Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence: Summary Report
For researchers and funding agencies, this report provides a qualitative summary of workshop discussions on a nascent concept, but offers no empirical results or concrete advances.
This report summarizes the outcomes of the 2024 Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence, which explored how structural features of material/biological/robotic systems can encode intelligence through responsiveness, adaptivity, memory, and learning. The workshop involved 38 academic researchers and 8 NSF program officers, and produced a summary of discussions and outcomes.
This report provides a summary of the outcomes of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence held in 2024. Mechanical Intelligence (MI) represents the phenomenon that novel structural features of material/biological/robotic systems can encode intelligence through responsiveness, adaptivity, memory, and learning in the mechanical structure itself. This is in contrast to computational intelligence, wherein the intelligence functions occur through electrical signaling and computer code. The two-day workshop was held at NSF headquarters on May 30-31 and included 38 invited academic researcher participants, and 8 program officers from the NSF. The workshop was structured around active small and large group discussions in groups of 4-5 and 9-10 with the goal of addressing topical questions on MI. Working groups entered notes into shared presentation slides for each discussion session and presented their outcomes in a final presentation on the last day. Here we summarize the overall outcomes of the workshop.