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MALIBU, Calif., April 29, 2010—HRL Laboratories, LLC, will lead a team of experts on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Physical Intelligence Program, the goal of which is to develop a physically grounded understanding of intelligence that can be applied to engineered systems.
The HRL team will establish a thermodynamically rigorous foundation for generating engineered intelligence. The objective is to discover and understand the underlying processes that give rise to biological intelligence and to emulate these processes in nonbiological systems to achieve tailored evolutionary advances. "The scientific community currently lacks an effective theoretical foundation to describe the evolution of the complexity evident in living intelligent systems," said Dr. Narayan Srinivasa, senior scientist at HRL and principal investigator. "We propose to develop a unifying framework of physical intelligence, which will enable us to understand how natural systems can evolve from basic interacting entities into emergent structures that exhibit complex functionality without the aid of an external program or plan."
In the initial 18-month phase of the program, HRL will develop a theoretical framework to explain physical intelligence. The team will develop three examples demonstrating the feasibility of engineering systems that exhibit physical intelligence, as well as analysis tools that can monitor a system and quantify when physical intelligence occurs and the degree of intelligence attained.
This research is part of HRL's newly created Center for Neural & Emergent Computational Systems. A key goal of the center is to explore the development of an entirely new computing paradigm for creating intelligent and efficient machines that can interact with, react to, evolve, adapt and actually learn from their environments.
Formerly Hughes Research Laboratories, HRL will be recognized as a Physics Historic Site by the American Physical Society on May 16, 2010, for demonstrating the world’s first working laser on the same date in 1960.###
HRL Laboratories, LLC, Malibu, California (www.hrl.com) is a corporate research-and-development laboratory owned by The Boeing Company and General Motors specializing in research into sensors and materials, information and systems sciences, applied electromagnetics, and microelectronics. HRL provides custom research and development and performs additional R&D contract services for its LLC member companies, the U.S. government, and other commercial companies.