Hod Lipson

Hod Lipson

Associate Professor

TED Talk
Popular Mechanics Fab@Home Newsweek
Wired
NY Times
The Guardian

More...

242 Upson Hall, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853-7501, USA
(607) 592 4383 (Cell)
(607) 254- 8940 (Lab)
hod.lipson@cornell.edu

Administrative Assistant: Gabe Terrizzi, (607) 255-0992, Upson 258
Office hours: TR 1pm-3pm or by appointment (see my calendar)
 
Announcements

• Graduate positions available - (Ph.D. in ME or CS): Biologically inspired Robotics, Design Automation, Rapid Prototyping, Evolutionary Computation, Artificial Life. See application tips.
• MEng Projects - AI, Rapid Prototyping, Robotics, and optimization
• Postdoc position available: Biologically inspired robotics, evolutionary computation (learn more)
• Try out our new Eureqa automated scientist and let it find equations in your data

Research: Bio-inspired robotics

Research Fields Evolutionary Robotics Design Automation Rapid Prototyping Artificial Life Self Assembly

Current Courses Evolutionary Computation and Design Automation Foundations of AI AI Practicum Seminar for 1st Year graduate students

Curriculum Vitae Download CV

Sponsors NSF Department of Energy NIH Department of Defense NASA DARPA

More Links Computational Synthesis Lab Students Press Map to Office Apply

My relatively broad spectrum of research projects focus on what I consider to be two “grand challenges” of engineering: (a) Can we design machines that can design other machines, and (b) Can we make machines that can make other machines. Both of these questions lie at the crux of understanding the engineering process itself, and progress on these fronts can offer huge leverage in our ability to design, make and maintain increasingly complex systems in the future. Biological life has answered these challenges in ways that dwarf the best teams of human engineers; I therefore use primarily biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insight into biology.

Can a computer ultimately augment or replace human invention?

IMAGINE A LEGO SET AT YOUR DISPOSAL: Bricks, rods, wheels, motors, sensors and logic are your atomic building blocks, and you must find a way to put them together to achieve a given high-level functionality: A machine that can move itself, say. You know the physics of the individual components' behaviors; you know the repertoire of pieces available, and you know how they are allowed to connect. But how do you determine the combination that gives you the desired functionality? This is the problem of Synthesis. Although we do it and teach it all the time, we do not have a formal model of how this can be done automatically.  More...

Visit the Computational Synthesis Lab
See also:  The end of engineering's hegemony  

Bio

In 2001 Hod Lipson joined the departments of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and the faculty of Computing & Information Science of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is also a member of the Computer Science and Computational Biology graduate fields at Cornell. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brandeis University's Computer Science Department and a Lecturer at MIT's Mechanical Engineering Department. He received his PhD in 1998 from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Before joining academia, he spent several years as a research engineer in the mechanical, electronic and software industries. See full CV...

• An Interview with Mark Stevenson

• An interview with Forbes

• An interview with Newsweek

• An interview at Cornell

Selected Recent Publications

• Lipson H., Kurman M., (2010) "Factory@Home: The Emerging Economy of Personal Fabrication" Report Commissioned by the Whitehouse Office of Science & Technology Policy

• Brown, E., Rodenberg, N., Amend, J., Mozeika, A., Steltz, E., Zakin, M., Lipson, H., Jaeger, H. (2010) "Universal robotic gripper based on the jamming of granular material," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (cover), Vol. 107, no. 44. .

• Schmidt M., Lipson H. (2009) "Distilling Free-Form Natural Laws from Experimental Data," Science, Vol. 324, no. 5923, pp. 81 - 85. Try it on your own data.

• Bongard J., Lipson H. (2007), “Automated reverse engineering of nonlinear dynamical systems", Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, vol. 104,  no. 24, pp. 9943–9948

• Lipson H. (2007) "Evolutionary Robotics: Emergence of Communication", Current Biology, Vol. 17 No 9, pp. R330-R332

• Bongard J., Zykov V., Lipson H. (2006), “Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling", Science Vol. 314. no. 5802, pp. 1118 - 1121

• Zykov V., Mytilinaios E., Adams B., Lipson H. (2005) "Self-reproducing machines", Nature Vol. 435 No. 7038, pp. 163-164

• Lipson H. (2005) "Homemade: The future of Functional Rapid Prototyping", IEEE Spectrum, feature article,  May 2005, pp. 24-31

• Lipson H. (2005) "Evolutionary Design and Evolutionary Robotics", Biomimetics, CRC Press (Bar Cohen, Ed.) pp. 129-155

• Lipson, H., Pollack J. B., (2000), "Automatic Design and Manufacture of Artificial Lifeforms", Nature 406, pp. 974-978. 

          More...

via mae.cornell.edu