Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence: Summary Report
Abstract
This report provides a summary of the outcomes of the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence held in 2024. Mechanical Intelligence (MI) represents the phenomenon that novel structural features of material/biological/robotic systems can encode intelligence through responsiveness, adaptivity, memory, and learning in the mechanical structure itself. This is in contrast to computational intelligence, wherein the intelligence functions occur through electrical signaling and computer code. The two-day workshop was held at NSF headquarters on May 30-31 and included 38 invited academic researcher participants, and 8 program officers from the NSF. The workshop was structured around active small and large group discussions in groups of 4-5 and 9-10 with the goal of addressing topical questions on MI. Working groups entered notes into shared presentation slides for each discussion session and presented their outcomes in a final presentation on the last day. Here we summarize the overall outcomes of the workshop.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.16381,
title = {Interdisciplinary Workshop on Mechanical Intelligence: Summary Report},
author = {Victoria A. Webster-Wood and Nicholas Gravish and Amir Alavi and Andres F Arrieta and Sarah Bergbreiter and Anthony Bloch and Laura Blumenschein and C. Chase Cao and Aja Mia Carter and Paolo Celli and Tony Chen and Margaret Coad and Mark Cutkosky and Michael Dickey and Brian Do and Robert Full and Mahdi Haghshenas-Jaryani and Kaushik Jayaram and Aaron Johnson and Eva Kanso and Emma Lejeune and Chen Li and Suyi Li and Jeffrey Lipton and Rob MacCurdy and Matt McHenry and Jean-Michel Mongeau and Todd Murphey and Mark Plecnik and Jordan Raney and Ryan D. Sochol and Hannah Stuart and Zeynep Temel and Michael Tolley and Barry Trimmer and T. J. Wallin and Kon-Well Wang and Wenzhong Yan and Mark Yim and Wenlong Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.16381},
year = {2026}
}