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Engineering Swarms and Beyond

Wednesday, March 15, 2017
Dr. Sanza Kazadi
Director of Student Inquiry and Research
Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy
Swarm engineering is a discipline that has largely focused on the description by biologists of swarm dynamics in nature and on development of computational and robotic swarms by engineers. In both cases, swarms are generally developed in an ad hoc manner, requiring a guess-and-check set of steps. These steps tend to be costly in time, computation, and effort. We discuss a middle-meeting method called the Hamiltonian method of swarm design, which generates swarm design requirements as functions of locally measurable and manipulable quantities. The design requirements are coordinates in a design phase space, and the task is interpreted as the path through phase space. We demonstrate that the approach yields swarm conditions which, when satisfied, provably yield to the swarm's function. We discuss the application of the swarm theoretical approach to entrochemical systems. These systems have been used to develop off-grid distillation systems, water heaters, and cooling systems. Finally, we examine the development of decision-making swarms from a phase space perspective.
Speaker Bio

Dr. Sanza Kazadi is a graduate of the California Institute of Technology where he earned is BS in Physics and his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems. He is currently the Director of Student Inquiry and Research at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and the head of the Entrochemical Systems and the Swarm Engineering Laboratories at IMSA. Dr. Kazadi is the author of more than sixty papers on topics primarily from the areas of swarm engineering, evolutionary computation, entrochemical systems, and mechanical engineering. He holds three patents for technologies related to renewable energy, with two additional patents currently pending. Prior to joining IMSA, Dr. Kazadi was the Founder and President of the Jisan Research Institute where he worked for twenty years. He was a co-founder of Wakunga Technologies, a technology management company out of Alhambra, CA and Corlume Inc., a renewable energy company out of Irvine, CA. He is passionate about research in swarm engineering and renewable energy and also about education, having devoted much of his professional life to developing an educational model that guides young people through experiential learning doing real science research, enabling them to make informed decisions about future careers in STEM.
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