Imitation of Life: A Search Engine for Biologically Inspired Design

Hen Emuna, Nadav Borenstein, Xin Qian, Hyeonsu Kang, Joel Chan, Aniket Kittur, Dafna Shahaf

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Abstract

Biologically Inspired Design (BID), or Biomimicry, is a problem-solving methodology that applies analogies from nature to solve engineering challenges. For example, Speedo engineers designed swimsuits based on shark skin. Finding relevant biological solutions for real-world problems poses significant challenges, both due to the limited biological knowledge engineers and designers typically possess and to the limited BID resources. Existing BID datasets are hand-curated and small, and scaling them up requires costly human annotations. In this paper, we introduce BARCODE (Biological Analogy Retriever), a search engine for automatically mining bio-inspirations from the web at scale. Using advances in natural language understanding and data programming, BARCODE identifies potential inspirations for engineering challenges. Our experiments demonstrate that BARCODE can retrieve inspirations that are valuable to engineers and designers tackling real-world problems, as well as recover famous historical BID examples. We release data and code; we view BARCODE as a step towards addressing the challenges that have historically hindered the practical application of BID to engineering innovation.

OriginalsprogEngelsk
TidsskriftProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Vol/bind38
Udgave nummer11
Sider (fra-til)503-511
Antal sider9
ISSN2159-5399
DOI
StatusUdgivet - 2024
Begivenhed38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2024 - Vancouver, Canada
Varighed: 20 feb. 202427 feb. 2024

Konference

Konference38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2024
Land/OmrådeCanada
ByVancouver
Periode20/02/202427/02/2024
SponsorAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

Bibliografisk note

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2024, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.

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