CENTER FOR ROBOTICS AND BIOSYSTEMSAT MCCORMICK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

Sam Kriegman is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Chemical and Biological Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. Sam and his students enjoy creating new kinds of simulations, robots, and AI with the ultimate goal of understanding how animals evolve, grow, move, sense, and think. Sam is a Schmidt Futures AI2050 Early Career Fellow and the recipient of the ISAL Distinguished Early-Career Investigator Award and the Cozzarelli Prize. His creation of the world's first AI-designed organisms (the "xenobots") triggered considerable global media attention and a tidal wave of public discourse, still ongoing, among scientists in several fields, science communicators, and the public.

Lab website: www.xenobot.group

Curriculum Vitae 

Google Scholar Citations

Postdoc, Biology, Tufts University and the Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Vermont

M.S., Statistics, University of Vermont

B.S., Applied Mathematics, Ohio University

Professor Kriegman's mixed under/graduate course Artificial Life (ALife) takes an embodied approach to artificial intelligence, beginning with autonomous robots and self-reproduction instead of humans and brains. Through weekly readings and the use of computer simulations, students learn strategies for designing, manufacturing, and controlling virtual creatures, physical robots, and synthetic biological constructs. Over the span of eight weeks, each student gradually builds a software system that allows them to conduct increasingly interesting artificial life experiments, culminating in a final project. For their final projects, each student identifies and investigates a detail of their simulated lifeforms, formulates a hypothesis and designs a control experiment that isolates and tests it.