Santa Fe Institute Collaboration Platform

Thermodynamics of Computation

Shamit Shrivastava

From Thermodynamics of Computation

Biography: Shamit is a Senior Research Associate at the Rosalind Franklin Institute under the research theme "imaging with light and sound". He is also affiliated with the department of engineering science at the University of Oxford. Shamit is developing photonic and acoustic tools for monitoring and controlling the state of biological materials. He is also synthesising functional nano-systems that can be controlled remotely via these tools. These tools and systems will allow to apply the laws of thermodynamics as design principles to solve major challenges in biomedical, environmental and computational sciences.

The vision is motivated by the extraordinary properties of sound waves in lipid interfaces that were established for the first time during Shamit's Ph.D. thesis at Boston University. The research strongly supports the possibility of sound being a physical basis for the phenomenon of nerve pulse propagation, and has been highlighted in the “Revolutions in Science” edition of the Scientific American and on the cover of German science magazine Spektrum. The research is fundamentally related to the thermodynamics and energy efficiency of computing in a single neuron.

Field(s) of Research: Computer Science Engineering to Address Energy Costs, General Non-equilibrium Statistical Physics, Thermodynamics of Neurobiology, Thermodynamics of Single Cells, Artificial Biological Computation

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