Cyborg insects, neural dust and other things: Building interfaces between the synthetic and the multicellular

As the computation and communication circuits we build radically miniaturize (i.e. become so low power that 1 pJ is sufficient to bang out a bit of information over a wireless transceiver; become so small that 500 μm2 of thinned CMOS can hold a reasonable sensor front-end and digital engine), the barrier to introducing all sorts of interfaces and control loops into organisms will lower radically. Put another way, the rapid pace of computation and communication miniaturization is swiftly blurring the line between the technological base that created us and the technological based we've created. This talk will provide an overview of recent work in the Maharbiz lab that touches on this concern. Some of this will cover our ongoing exploration of the remote control of insects in free flight via implantable radio-equipped miniature neural stimulating systems and more recent work in next generation mammalian neural interfaces for brain machine interface (BMI) applications, including neural dust.