SETH COPEN GOLDSTEIN
Associate Professor, Computer Science, Robotics Institute, and Electrical and Computer Engineering
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My research theme centers around the design and manufacture of systems which contain massive numbers of components. My goal is to understand how to build robust and useful systems which can scale towards billions or even Moles of components. In pursuit of this goal I have been working in several different areas of computer science, electrical engineering and robotics. My current primary projects are: the Phoenix Project (reconfigurable computing, chemically assembled electronic nanotechnology, and directed self-assembly), The Claytronics Project (programmable Matter and Emergent Behavior), and a new project, "Brain in a Bottle."

At a high level, the goal of the Phoenix project ( www.cs.cmu.edu/~phoenix) is to create robust aperiodic complex systems from simple, homogeneous, and possibly defective parts. In the Phoenix project we are focusing on new computer architectures (reconfigurable architectures) and new compilation techniques (compiling high-level languages directly into hardware descriptions) which will enable one to build inexpensive high-performance low-power computing systems out of components that might be as simple as molecules.

The goal of the Claytronics project ( www.cs.cmu.edu/~claytronics) is to develop a form of programmable matter which moves programmability from the domain of computing into the domain of everyday matter. The idea is to create an ensemble of millions of very simple particles (the size of a grain of sand), each of which can compute, communicate, move, and adhere to one another. When taken as a whole, the ensemble can run a program which will result in the ensemble forming arbitrary dynamic shapes which can exert forces in the real world. In pursuit of this goal we are experimenting with building robots, developing programming languages, designing new debugging tools, creating new distributed algorithms, and studying emergence.

The goal of the Brain in a Bottle project (www.cs.cmu.edu/~seth/brain) is to harness self-assembly and micron-scale bulk manufacturing to create a brain-scale computer with similar computational power and connectivity as the human brain.