The 35th conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS2021) featured eight invited talks. In this post, we give a flavour of the final presentation. Radhika's research focusses on collective intelligence, with the overarching goal being to understand how large groups of individuals, with local interaction rules, can cooperate to achieve globally complex behaviour. Each individual is miniscule compared to the massive phenomena that they create, and, with a limited view of the actions of the rest of the swarm, they achieve striking coordination. Looking at collective intelligence from an algorithmic point-of-view, the phenomenon emerges from many individuals interacting using simple rules.

In this article, we summarise the content from our focus series on the UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) number 14: life below water, and we highlight further interesting research in the field. The UN write that the aim of this goal is to: "Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development." This includes topics such as reducing marine pollution, protecting and restoring ecosystems, reducing ocean acidification, and sustainable fishing. The aim of the OcéanIA project is to develop new artificial intelligence and mathematical modelling tools to contribute to the understanding of the oceans and their role in regulating and sustaining the biosphere, and tackling climate change. We interviewed Nayat Sánchez-Pi, Director of the Inria Chile Research Center, who told us more about this important and exciting project.

Today we continue with our series on IEEE/RSJ IROS 2020 (International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) original series Real Roboticist. This time you'll meet Radhika Nagpal, who is a Fred Kavli Professor of Computer Science at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering from Harvard University. Did you know Rhadika directed the research that led to the creation of the Kilobots, the first open-source, low-cost robots that were specifically designed for large scale experiments with hundreds and thousands of them? You can watch this example or this other one if you're curious. If you'd like to know more about Rhadika and her achievements, challenges and what she would tell her younger self, below is the whole interview.

Science fiction visions of the future show us AI built to replicate our way of thinking -- but what if we modeled it instead on the other kinds of intelligence found in nature? Robotics engineer Radhika Nagpal studies the collective intelligence displayed by insects and fish schools, seeking to understand their rules of engagement. In a visionary talk, she presents her work creating artificial collective power and previews a future where swarms of robots work together to build flood barriers, pollinate crops, monitor coral reefs and form constellations of satellites. Radhika Nagpal Taking cues from bottom-up biological networks like those of social insects, Radhika Nagpal helped design an unprecedented "swarm" of ant-like robots. Why you should listen With a swarm of 1,024 robots inspired by the design of ant colonies, Radhika Nagpal and her colleagues at Harvard's SSR research group have redefined expectations for self-organizing robotic systems.