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SUMMARY:Designing “Materials that Compute”:  Exploiting the Properties
  of Self-oscillating Polymer Gels - Prof. Anna C. Balazs\, University of P
 ittsburgh
DTSTART:20160429T131500Z
DTEND:20160429T141500Z
UID:TALK65965@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Lucy Colwell
DESCRIPTION:Lightweight\, deformable materials that can sense and respond 
 to human touch and motion can be the basis of future wearable computers\, 
 where the material itself will be capable of performing computations. To f
 acilitate the creation of "materials that compute"\, we draw from two emer
 ging modalities for computation: chemical computing\, which relies on reac
 tion-diffusion mechanisms to perform operations\, and oscillatory computin
 g\, which performs pattern recognition through synchronization of coupled 
 oscillators. Chemical computing systems\, however\, suffer from the fact t
 hat the reacting species are coupled only locally\; the coupling is limite
 d by diffusion as the chemical waves propagate throughout the system. Addi
 tionally\, oscillatory computing systems have not utilized a potentially w
 earable material. To address both these limitations\, we develop the first
  model for coupling self-oscillating polymer gels to a piezoelectric (PZ) 
 micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS). The resulting transduction between
  chemo-mechanical and electrical energy creates signals that can be propag
 ated quickly over long distances and thus\, permits remote\, non-diffusive
 ly coupled oscillators to communicate and synchronize. The oscillators can
  be organized into arbitrary topologies because the electrical connections
  lift the limitations of diffusive coupling. Using our model\, we predict 
 the synchronization behavior that can be used for computational tasks\, ul
 timately enabling "materials that compute".
LOCATION:Department of Chemistry\, Cambridge\, Pfizer lecture theatre
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