My name is Martin Roth. I am a fourth year graduate student under Dr. Stephen Wicker at the Wireless Intelligent Systems Laboratory in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University.
    In general, I am interested in systems involving the interaction of many independent individuals. Even systems governed by a few basic rules can yield surprisingly complex behavior, which cannot be predicted by analyzing individual behavior. A good example of such systems is cellular automata, such as John Conway’s Game of Life. A notable attribute of cellular automata is that each individual is only “aware” of the world immediately adjacent to it. The system is truly distributed; only local information is needed.
     Related topics include computability, complexity, artificial intelligence, and artificial life. Complex behavior is not difficult to generate, but the question arises of how this complexity can be harnessed to solve specific problems. How simple can the individuals of the system be? What rules are needed? How much information about the world around them do individuals need? How many individuals are needed to make the system work? What and where are the tradeoffs? How can we draw inspiration and models from nature? As usual, there are many questions and few answers.
    My immediate research focuses on the application of ideas based on the collective behavior of social insects to routing in mobile wireless ad hoc networks. Social insects such as termites, ants, and bees embody a concept termed swarm intelligence, wherein the interactions of simple individuals yields a complex superorganism worth much more than just the sum of its parts. Attractive properties of such systems include strong scalability, simple unit implementations and system-wide robustness.
    In simulation, approximations of the behavioral rules of ants are highly effective in demonstrating effectiveness in food scavenging. Similarly for the hill building behavior of termites. Analogies may be drawn from one domain to the next, such as equating destination nodes in a network with food, and packets with insects. Then, we have insects scavenging for food.
    Please feel free to contact me in reference to these subjects. I am always open to new ideas and discussion.