This event is part of the 2019 Cleveland Humanities Festival: Nature.

This lecture is presented by Dr. Vikram Shyam, Principal Investigator, PeTaL/Nature-inspired Design, NASA Glenn Research Center.

Humans have used nature and emulated biology throughout our history. We look at the evolution of bionic design and the future it may forge. This future will mark the dawn of synthetic life, living machines, nature-inspired artificial intelligence and the emergence of humans as a solar system species, a species that figured out how to live sustainably and overcome the enormous challenges it faced. PeTaL, The Periodic Table of Life, is an attempt to usher in this future by using AI to systematically learn from nature and architect sustainable solutions to human problems.

This event is sponsored by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and is part of their Explorers Series.