The idea is to be open. I think open for looking for interesting solutions in nature. And the approach probably quite unique still for my group, but I think it becoming more and more popular is. We have two directions of how we look at nature. One is, let's say there is an interesting creature doing something amazing and we are trying to learn what is this happening and maybe apply it. That's one approach and applied maybe two different things. But even more interesting is just emerging now is that instead of looking for one creature that tells us something. What if we take lessons from completely different organisms? They have nothing in common. They have different environments. But one can teach something, but it's not enough for a certain purpose. Together with yet another organism, you can learn something else and combining lessons from completely different organisms that evolve their things for their specific needs. But then to solve a certain problem. So that's a really interesting approach is that really take small lessons from plants, from dritle stars. Because I have research where I combine lessons from this creature with this so they have nothing in common. That's that one taught us something. This one taught us something. Combining them together to produce a new technology that would never appear if we wouldn't combined these two lessons. So I'm physical chemist by training. I'm not an engineer. I'm not a biologist. I'm not a medical doctor. So I am a physical chemist. However, I do a lot of physics, math, architecture and biology and medicine research. Why that is possible is that I feel that none of these disciplines alone are capable of addressing tomorrow's questions adequately or have the tools to do it in the most efficient way. So I feel that when I combine in my group I try to bring mathematicians, physicists, chemists, medical doctors, and designers together. The goal for that is to think about the way these people would address science in unusual ways, just to give you the very simple demonstration of that. If one wants to describe why this butterfly has these beautiful colors, actually we pretty much need to know optics and physics and optics alone will describe what is happening with this butterfly. However, all our technological changes, all the improvements that we had were due to the fact that, okay, you we understand optics. But what if I now use my chemistry knowledge and I encrypt chemical information inside this structure. What if now this optical device would have different chemistries in different locations? So without chemistry pretty much anything that we've done with this material would be absolutely impossible. Suddenly chemistry gave a nice spread of applications and possibilities that optics, physics alone couldn't do. Chemistry alone also couldn't do it so chemistry was physics, with optics, gave an interesting outcome. But then, yet another area having fluid mechanists in my group brought the ideas of how liquids that would infiltrate these structures can move around in interesting ways. And then this way to create interesting, unusual changes in color and response to environment. So in my opinion, it's very important for kids, for future, still have very clear depths in some traditional disciplines. If I were now to have a high school student choosing what to do, I would say begin with choosing one discipline that you will learn very deeply as you first degree. But then especially for those who are interested in science and will stay in science, I as a PhD worker, or I would then create teams of different backgrounds coming together. And learning something from another community that you alone wouldn't know otherwise. So this bringing together expertise is I think the future and I hope that we'll see more and more papers and technologies that where a clear outcome of multiple disciplines contributing to the overall design. >> My main quest is to understand the principles that underline intelligence. And I believe that this happens through learning. That intelligent behavior arises in nature and in the computers that we are building through learning. The machine, the animal, the human, becomes intelligent because it learns. And understanding the underlining principles is like understanding the laws of aerodynamics for building airplanes, all right. I and others in my field are trying to figure out where is the equivalent of the laws of aerodynamics, but for intelligence. So that's the quest. And we're taking inspiration from Brains. We're taking inspiration from a lot of experiments that we're doing with computers trying to learn from data. We're taking inspiration from other disciplines, from physics, from psychology, neuroscience, and other fields, even electrical engineering and of course, statistics. I mean, it's a very multidisciplinary area. >> Yeah, I think it's, I mean, I think, in general, working on the boundary between two different fields, you find interesting areas that people tend to specialize in just one area. And so they miss the things at the boundaries. And so we've had a lot of fun exploring these boundaries. And I think it comes partly from our different backgrounds. My dad with the art background, me with the more math and science background. And we're always talking to each other and so we see the connections. When I started graduate school and was doing this more theoretical mathematical work. My dad saw it and was that's interesting it's kind of creativity you're going through. And solving unsolved mathematical problems is very much the kind of thing that I go through and designing new sculptures or thinking about new art to build. And so we started working together then. And I taught him to become a mathematician and he taught me to become an artist. And so now we work on both together. And it's a lot of fun for us to collaborate in that way, but also leads to really interesting questions and inspirations, where instead of just thinking, okay. The math is the serious stuff and everything else is just side project. We think of everything as main projects and they inspire each other in ways that we couldn't predict. >> Good, our series, it tends to really portray that scientists are working on the frontiers of science. Do you see yourself as a person that is working on the frontier of knowledge, frontier of science? >> Definitely, yeah, you could say frontiers of science and art, maybe, or that interplay. But yeah, we're always as scientists, we're always excited about the unknown. And I mean, as soon as we understand something fully, it becomes almost boring. [LAUGH] And we want to move onto the next thing. I mean, we write down what we know, and publish it, and share it with the world so they can build on top of it. But then, we're always excited about the next question, which we don't understand. That's really what drives us is the parts that we don't quite understand or that seems a little strange and we're curious about. And yeah, that's where we explore next.
