Designing Emergence Laboratory

At the Designing Emergence Laboratory at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, we’re interested in understanding and designing complex and emergent systems -- systems of many independent interacting components, where each component may be understood very well in isolation, but when many of them get together, some interesting new collective behavior appears. We study these systems from both a scientific and an engineering standpoint: Can we predict the collective outcome from the rules the individual agents follow? Can we design low-level behaviors that guarantee a particular high-level result?