At Ecovative, I lead the engineering of next-generation mycelium-based compute chips and explore their potential for physical AI and neuromorphic computing. Mycelium offers a uniquely customizable and scalable platform for analog sensing, actuation, and machine learning applications.

This research is funded by DARPA BTO’s AIxBIO program.

A publication is currently under review. Please reach out for details.

“Reservoirs of Venice” is our contribution to the 19th Venice Architettura Biennial: Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. The project explores the potential of using the urban environment as a computational medium to reflect its own conditions and predict its future.

Dietmar Offenhuber and I collaborated on building a “water computer” that learns from human activity, gleaned from the spatiotemporal patterns of Venice’s water surfaces. During the exhibition, the installation will learn to interpret its activity resulting from human movement and environmental conditions, and to predict the time of day. Unlike energy-intensive digital AI systems, this computer is composed of the very elements it computes with, and requires only a fraction of the energy to operate.

The work critically engages with urban computing by moving beyond traditional data-centric paradigms. Historically, urban computing has focused either on digital systems – relying on sensors and control networks – or on models that use physical analogies to understand urban dynamics. Reservoirs of Venice proposes a third paradigm in which physical processes are used to transform information, rather than serve as analogies.

For more information, please see:
res-venice.github.io

Photography: Sebastian Gonzalez Quintero

At Ecovative, we design and grow materials with mycelium. Discovering the many unique properties of fungi means doing a lot of testing. I joined the company as the director of the Foundry Engineering team, my role was to pursue the vision and possibilities new biomaterials by developing tools for doing rigorous scientific research at scale. To that end, I led a group of engineers and software developers in building a first-of-its-kind platform for inventing and fine-tuning a wide range of mycelium biomaterials. The Foundry has been at the heart of Ecovative’s innovation process for growing AirMycelium™ material.

As of August 2023, the Foundry Engineering team became the Data Systems and Intelligence group. Our focus shifted from designing bench scale platforms to overseeing the entire data architecture for the company, including our scale-out partners for food and textiles.

We develop data collection pipelines, control systems, predictive models, and analytics for different workflows, from farm operations to material testing.

Read more about our Foundry

B | reactor is a grow-on-demand culturing platform that enables flavor discovery and standardization for fermentation products. Through custom hardware, software and consumables, we significantly reduce the costs and risks associated with innovation.
The integrated platform make it easier to test ideas and prototype products at scale.

The B | reactor is a patent-pending technology developed by Biorealize between 2018-2022.

See US20210340479A1 for details and a write-up about its potential for accelerating biomanufacturing

Microbial Design Studio is an automated biofabrication machine that brings together the capabilities of a biology wetlab into a single inexpensive piece of hardware to design, culture, and test genetically modified organisms.

The studio is built as a modular platform that includes design, analysis and flow control software to automate all stages of microbial design from bacterial transformation to incubation, lysis, and purification.

The machine streamlines the process of designing microorganisms to grow biologically-derived macromolecules (e.g., proteins) and can be used for running concurrent experiments where different DNA designs and growth conditions can be parametrically and combinatorially explored. The platform is specifically designed for model-based digital-physical (hybrid) experimentation that address research reproducibility. Multiple Microbial Design Studios can be networked and pursue high-throughout research across different locations.

The Microbial Design Studio addresses the needs of next generation designers, scientists, and engineers who need professional design and research tools to work with synthetic biology and life sciences.

The Microbial Design Studio is a patented technology developed by Biorealize. See U.S. patent number 10,954,483 for details.

Echologue is a new type of public media that functions as a social catalyst in public spaces and urban environments. It is made of a double-sided foldable display architecture that can be customized for individual or public interaction. By bending the tiles into different geometries, users can reverse the flow of the graphics and provide input for the content.

Echologue is used as public interface for sensing and displaying socio-cultural characteristics of a place based on its sonic features. It is built to reflect its surroundings like a smart mirror, highlight the salient details and patterns in the environment and contribute to our understanding of the perception of social places. This interface senses ambient sound, records deliberate user input and displays a visualization of the activity in that space as its output. The design explores the utility of sound for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings.

Exhibition
Pixelspaces 07 *OnField*, Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, September 5-11, 2007.

Selected Review 

Birkhäuser (PDF)

Publications
Telhan, Orkan. "Materials with Computational Experience and Style." To appear in Journal of Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, A Special Issue on Material Computing, Forthcoming 2010.

Locast (2009) is a platform for sharing and discovering location-based user-generated videos and production quality multimedia content provided by RAI TV. 

It consists of a combination of mobile and wearable computing elements supported by a distributed Web application. Content gathered from RAI TV’s historical archives and user-generated media are linked to physical locations in Venice in order to be accessible to all those visiting the space.

Specific Project Role
Wearable design lead.
Wearable software, hardware and product design
with John Luciani and Guz Gutman.

First Deployment
July 3-10, 2009, Venice.

URL
http://locast.mit.edu

Pictures
Production

The Cloud (2008) is an interactive public sculpture that responds to human interaction. It can display graphics, animation and video on its three-dimensional surface. It expresses context awareness using hundreds of sensors and over 15,000 individually addressable optical fibers and respond to the audience by visual or audio output. Constructed of carbon glass, the Cloud encourages visitors to touch and interact with information in new ways, manifesting emotions and behavior through sound and a dichotomy of luminescence and darkness.

The Cloud is developed at the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and commissioned by Pitti Immagine to be installed at Fortezza da Basso, Florence.

A video of the project can be found here

Project Role
Concept and interaction design.
Lead software and hardware designer.

Exhibition
Pitti Uomo 2008, June 18-22, Florence.

Ride.link (2008) is a sustainable ride-sharing system that utilizes bracelets, mobile phones and a web infrastructure to create a peer-to-peer trust network.

The system, comprised of social networking, reputation management and referral systems makes it possible to coordinate the matching of drivers and passengers with preferences entered online in user profiles. An alcohol sensor is built into a wearable bracelet, which can communicate with the system. 

At the end of a night out partying and drinking with friends a Ridelink user can breathe into their breathalyzer bracelet to find out if it is unsafe for them to drive. Using a link to their mobile phone, the system can then help the user find a ride with a driver they trust. The system tracks successful ride shares and provides incentives to participants accordingly. Ridelink not only promotes responsible alcohol consumption, it encourages social sustainability by allowing users to self-organize into their own ride-share pools.

The prototypes were tested Brescia in December 2008 and January 2009 with 50 bracelets.

Ride.link is developed at the MIT Mobile Experience Lab. 

Specific Project Role
Design Lead (concept, interaction design and bracelet development). 

Video
The Concept
The Making of Ride.link