Hardware and software progresses on designing programmable matter

Programmable matter (PM) has different meanings but they can be sorted depending on four properties: Evolutivity, Programmability, Autonomy and Interactivity. In my talk, I will present our research in the Claytronics project which is an instance of PM, evolutive, programmable, autonomous and interactive. In Claytronics, PM is implemented as a huge modular self-reconfigurable robot. To manage the complexity of this kind of environment, we propose a complete environment which includes programmable hardware, a programming langage, a compiler, a simulator, a debugger and distributed algorithms.
Julien Bourgeois is a professor of computer science at the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté (UBFC) in France. He is leading the computer science department at the FEMTO-ST institute/CNRS. His research interests include distributed intelligent MEMS (DiMEMS), Programmable Matter, P2P networks and security management for complex networks. He has worked for more than 15 years on these topics and has co-authored more than 140 international publications. He was an invited professor at Carnegie Mellon University (US) from September 2012 to August 2013, at Emory University (US) in 2011 and at Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2010, 2011 and 2015. He led different funded research projects (Smart Surface, Smart Blocks, Computation and coordination for DiMEMS). He is currently leading the programmable matter project funded by the ANR and the ISITE-BFC project and the topic "System architecture, communication, networking" in the LABEX ACTION, a 10 MÂ,funded program whose aims at building integrated smart systems. He has also worked in the Centre for Parallel Computing at the University of Wetsminster (UK) and in the Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche (CNR) in Genova. He collaborated with several other institutions (Lawrence Livermore National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, etc.). He organized and chaired many conferences (dMEMS 2010, 2012, HotP2P/IPDPS 2010, Euromicro PDP 2008 and 2010, IEEE GreenCom 2012, IEEE iThings 2012, IEEE CPSCom 2012, GPC 2012, IEEE HPCC 2014, IEEE ICESS 2014, CSS 2014, IEEE CSE 2016, IEEE EUC 2015, IEEE ATC 2017, IEEE CBDCom 2017). He is also acting as a consultant for the French government and for companies.