Two Indian American Duke University researchers — Gaurav Arya and Tania Roy — are part of four Duke-led teams selected for the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Genesis Mission.
These teams will use artificial intelligence to build better models of atomic nuclei, react to stellar explosions faster, imbue robots with more brain-like circuitry and design new DNA-based materials, according to Duke Today.
The Genesis Mission is a national initiative led by the DOE, which is building the world’s most powerful integrated science discovery platform. These projects have received Phase I awards ranging from $500,000 to $750,000 and will be supported for nine months.
Pratt School of Engineering’s Gaurav Arya leads the Duke Project on “AI-Driven Inverse Design of Patchy DNA Origami for Assembly of Programmable Superlattices.”
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Arya and the team will design AI-driven models for DNA origami, an emerging approach to precisely designing materials with nanoscale structures for a variety of energy applications.
Folding DNA in various ways can create many different kinds of materials but planning those designs is a big computational challenge for which AI is a promising solution.
“We’re just beginning to tap into this enormous design space, and we expect the novel biomaterials that result from this effort will greatly impact industries such as energy production, chemical manufacturing and even quantum computing,” Arya said.
Arya is a Professor in the Thomas Lord Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science. His research laboratory uses physics-based computational tools to provide fundamental, molecular-level understanding of a diverse range of biological and soft-material systems, with the aim of discovering new phenomena and developing new technologies.
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Pratt’s Tania Roy is part of Duke project led by Yiran Chen on “Neuromorphic Circuit Primitives for Robotic Embodied Physical AI.” They are developing new hardware for AI-powered robots that is 10 times faster and 100 times more efficient than current designs.
The team is designing neuromorphic processors that mimic the way our brain and nervous system are structured. Currently, the speed of processing data from cameras and other sensors is a bottleneck to making AI robots useful beyond niche applications.
Roy is Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Her work focuses on developing hardware for artificial intelligence applications using novel functional materials including two-dimensional materials.
“The completed system will resemble a steel-born Centaur – a synthetic organism whose fundamental neuromorphic computing components and abilities form its muscles, skeleton and nervous system,” Chen said.