Episode 13: Game of Drones

Game of Drones

Guest: Lieutenant Colonel Jason Cody

Humans tend to think of intelligent behavior as originating in the brain.  Analogously, we think of artificially intelligent behavior as originating in a computer central processing unit.

In this episode of “Mind the Gap: Dialogs on Artificial Intelligence” we discuss intelligent behavior emerging from swarms of simple robots.

In nature we see coherent cooperative behavior from collections of animals like colonies of termites, colonies of ants, and hives of bees.  Scientists have studied these organisms and their behavior for a long time, trying to understand how these animals coordinate their behavior so effectively, given the simplicity of their nervous systems.

Computer scientists began to explore swarm intelligence in the 1990s.  Our guest for this episode is Lieutenant Colonel Jason Cody from the United States Military Academy at West Point.  Colonel Cody’s doctoral research at Vanderbilt focused on swarm intelligence and its potential in practical applications in human-swarm teams.

Jason is an assistant professor and active duty officer teaching in the Academy’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.  As a career Signal Corps (or communications) officer, he has deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Kuwait.  In addition to his distinguished service in the Army, he has authored and co-authored numerous academic publications in artificial intelligence and is a graduate of the Command and General Staff College. 

Recorded: 2022-04-19