BIOMIMETIC MATERIALS

Submitted by: - Vinay Attri

501704111
Email Id: - vinayattri28@gmail.com

Introduction: -
What I have learned in the class is that how various insects, organisms, plants and other things
in nature have different qualities that they use for their survival and how scientists are
innovating technologies and developing various products inspired from the qualities of these
insects to benefit humans. For Example: - How the Velcro tape is inspired from tiny hooks on
bur fruits, how water repellent clothes are inspired form shark skin etcetera.
Biomimetics materials are those materials which are inspired form nature. The technique used
to develop these materials is called biomimetics or biomimicry. Nature has inspired many
innovations made by scientists which lead to the solution of complex human problem. The
oldest and best example of biomimetics is the study of birds to make humans fly, which lead
to the innovation of aeroplane by Wright Brothers. Another example is design of Shinkansen
bullet train which is inspired from Kingfisher bird.
There are three essence elements of biomimetics: - Ethos, Re-Connect and Emulate.
Ethos represents a person’s respect for, responsibility to and gratitude fellow species and one’s
home. This element comes from the emulation of nature in creating conditions conductive to
life.
Re-Connect is a practice and mindset that explores and deepens the relationship between
humans and the rest of nature.
Emulate is the element that brings the principles, patterns, strategies, and functions found in
nature forward to inform design. It is about being proactive in attaining the vision of humans
fitting sustainably on earth.

Experience in the class: -

I had great experience in the class. I got to know about the origin and inspiration behind the
development of various products that how they are inspired from nature. I came to know about
how we can observe everything around us and think of an idea that can be used to develop a
new product which will help the humanity and will also benefit nature. Method of teaching
used by Prof. George John was very effective and examples and videos shown by him made
the things easier to understand. Overall It was a great experience for me as I got to know about
many new things and increase my knowledge.
Neural Networks: -
Neural networks refer to models of computing that are inspired from the neuronal connections
in the brain. Computer scientists have built neural networks by creating individual processing
units, performing fundamental operations, mimicking the action of neurons. A network is built
by connecting these processing units, much in the same way that neurons connects in brain.
The original goal of the Neural Network approach was to solve problems in the same way that
a human brain would. Neural Networks have been used on a variety of tasks like computer
vision, speech recognition, machine translation, social network filtering, playing board and
medical diagnosis. Such systems learn task by considering examples. For Example: - in image
recognition, they might learn to identify images that contain lions by analysing example images
that have been manually labelled as "lion" or "no lion" and using the results to identify lions in
other images. They do this without any a priori knowledge about lions.
Types of learnings in Neural Networks: -
 Supervised Learning
 Unsupervised Learning
 Reinforcement Learning
 Offline Learning
 Online Learning
Strengths and Weaknesses of Neural Networks: -

Strengths: -

 On large datasets that have been some of the most challenging in the history of artificial
intelligence they have outperformed other approaches and not by a little, by a lot as in
a step-function change. This includes: speech, image recognition, image captioning,
natural language processing, handwriting recognition, and Go.
 They address one of the most challenging problems in machine learning i.e. working
out the right set of features for a problem.
 Deep learning can encode features useful across problem domains e.g. you can train the
lower levels of an image recognizer on one dataset, and on the next dataset you don't
have to start from scratch.

Weaknesses: -

 They require huge amounts of data. Most problems, a person wouldn't think of using a
neural net without 10,000 examples at least and preferably in the millions. Other
algorithms like decision trees, logistic regression, naive Bayes can perform well with
much less data.
 They are very computationally expensive to train. It is only the advancements in GPUs
that has made training neural networks viable.
 The theoretical foundation of neural networks is the weakest of the modern strands of
machine learning. Kernel methods, information theoretic methods e.g. decision trees,
and probabilistic graphical models all have considerably stronger theoretical
foundations.
Conclusion: -

The computing world has a lot to gain from neural networks. Their ability to learn by example
makes them very flexible and powerful. Furthermore, there is no need to devise an algorithm
to perform a specific task; i.e. there is no need to understand the internal mechanisms of that
task. They are also very well suited for real time systems because of their fast response and
computational times which are due to their parallel architecture. Neural networks also
contribute to other areas of research such as neurology and psychology. They are regularly
used to model parts of living organisms and to investigate the internal mechanisms of the brain.
Perhaps the most exciting aspect of neural networks is the possibility that someday 'conscious'
networks might be produced. Finally, I would like to state that even though neural networks
have a huge potential we will only get the best of them when they are integrated with
computing, AI, fuzzy logic and related subjects.

Critic on the course: -

According to me the way the course was designed was good. It covered many important topics.
Only thing I guess should be improved is that there should be more number of lectures in the
course.