The uniting theme of my research is "engineered self-organization," which is the production of predictable aggregate behavior from locally interacting elements. At present, my investigations are mainly in the domains of synthetic biology (the predictive engineering of desired behaviors in living cells), and aggregate and spatial computing (the description and control of systems of many weakly connected computing devices, and an extension of amorphous computing). Previous research subjects have included work on human-like intelligence and various learning and reasoning systems.