Imitation of Life: A Search Engine for Biologically Inspired Design

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Biologically Inspired Design (BID), or Biomimicry, is a problem-solving methodology that applies analogies from nature to solve engineering challenges. For example, Speedo engineers designed swimsuits based on shark skin. Finding relevant biological solutions for real-world problems poses significant challenges, both due to the limited biological knowledge engineers and designers typically possess and to the limited BID resources. Existing BID datasets are hand-curated and small, and scaling them up requires costly human annotations. In this paper, we introduce BARCODE (Biological Analogy Retriever), a search engine for automatically mining bio-inspirations from the web at scale. Using advances in natural language understanding and data programming, BARCODE identifies potential inspirations for engineering challenges. Our experiments demonstrate that BARCODE can retrieve inspirations that are valuable to engineers and designers tackling real-world problems, as well as recover famous historical BID examples. We release data and code; we view BARCODE as a step towards addressing the challenges that have historically hindered the practical application of BID to engineering innovation.

Original languageEnglish
JournalProceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume38
Issue number11
Pages (from-to)503-511
Number of pages9
ISSN2159-5399
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024
Event38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2024 - Vancouver, Canada
Duration: 20 Feb 202427 Feb 2024

Conference

Conference38th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, AAAI 2024
CountryCanada
CityVancouver
Period20/02/202427/02/2024
SponsorAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

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