Modularity as a basis for innovation: George Heineman at TEDxWPI
Summary
TLDRThe speaker, a computer scientist, explores the concept of modularity and its crucial role in innovation. By drawing parallels between biological systems and modern technology, the speaker demonstrates how modular design in both fields fosters adaptability, evolution, and new functionality. Examples range from the Cambrian explosion in biology to the development of software stacks in computing. The talk concludes that modularity not only simplifies complex systems but also drives innovation by enabling the creation of new modules and applications.
Takeaways
- 🔧 Innovation is driven by understanding complex systems and their evolution over time.
- 🌐 Complex systems, whether biological or technological, follow a model, specification, and realization structure.
- 📞 The evolution of communication systems, like the telephone, highlights how simple models grow into complex systems.
- 🧬 Biological systems, such as the development of multicellular organisms, offer insights into the principles of innovation.
- 🐦 Adaptation, evolution, and exaptation (repurposing traits) are key biological processes that can inspire technological innovation.
- 🔗 Modularity is a core principle in innovation, where systems are broken into independently replaceable and extendable units.
- 💻 Modularity in software, such as modern app development, allows for flexible, scalable innovation through well-defined interfaces.
- 🫀 Organ transplants demonstrate the concept of modularity in biology, where the heart is a functional unit that can be replaced.
- 📱 Software stacks, like the LAMP stack, are examples of modular components that work together to create more complex, powerful systems.
- 🔬 Biomimicry, or drawing inspiration from nature, shows how modularity in biological evolution can be applied to technology and innovation.
Q & A
What is the main focus of the speaker's talk?
-The speaker focuses on innovation, particularly how concepts from biology and modularity can inspire the design of complex systems in technology, such as computing and telecommunications.
How does the speaker relate biology to complex systems in technology?
-The speaker draws a parallel between biological evolution, like the emergence of eukaryotic cells and multicellular organisms, and the development of complex technological systems. Both involve modularity and adaptation, allowing for innovation and complexity over time.
What is the importance of modularity in innovation according to the speaker?
-Modularity is key to innovation because it allows systems to be independently constructed, extended, replaced, or adapted for different purposes. It simplifies the complexity of systems and enables them to evolve and integrate new functions.
What historical example does the speaker use to illustrate the evolution of complex systems?
-The speaker references the Cambrian explosion, which occurred around 540 million years ago, as a tipping point in biological complexity, where many multicellular organisms evolved. This example highlights how modular systems can suddenly increase in complexity and variety.
How does the speaker explain the concept of adaptation in the context of innovation?
-Adaptation is described as the ability to acquire new traits, similar to adding new features or functionality to a system. In biological terms, it's like how species acquire traits that allow them to survive, and in technology, it's akin to upgrading systems or software.
What is the speaker’s view on exaptation, and how is it relevant to innovation?
-Exaptation refers to traits developed for one purpose that get repurposed for another. The speaker uses the example of bird feathers originally evolving for heat regulation but later being used for flight, illustrating how innovation can arise by reusing existing modules in new contexts.
How does the speaker link innovation in biology to modern technology?
-The speaker compares biological modularity, like gene and trait transfer, to modern software and hardware systems. Just as genes can be transferred to different organisms, technological modules (like software stacks) can be reused and repurposed across different platforms.
What example does the speaker provide to explain modularity in technology?
-The speaker gives the example of a 'software stack,' where different pre-built software components, like Linux, MySQL, and Apache, are integrated to create a complete system, showing how modular systems can lead to greater innovation by leveraging independent components.
What does the speaker mean by ‘the system becomes a module in the future’?
-The speaker suggests that as technology advances, what is currently considered a complex system will eventually be simplified into a module that can be easily integrated or replaced. This continuous shift allows for further innovation by building on top of existing modules.
Why does the speaker believe that modularity is essential for sustaining innovation in complex systems?
-Modularity breaks down complex systems into manageable units, allowing for flexibility, extensibility, and the ability to replace outdated components. This structure is crucial for evolving systems to remain functional, adaptable, and innovative over time.
Outlines
💻 Introduction to Innovation and Complex Systems
The speaker introduces the concept of innovation from the perspective of a computer scientist, emphasizing how training in computer science provides skills to understand complex systems. They discuss how complex systems, both natural and man-made (e.g., biology, telecommunications), have evolved and how innovation is essential for sustaining and enhancing these systems. By comparing biological evolution to the development of modern infrastructure, the speaker highlights the role of models and realizations in the design process, using examples like the invention of the telephone and constitutional governance.
🪟 Modularity in Systems: From Windows to Innovation
The speaker introduces the concept of modularity in systems, describing modules as units of functionality with well-defined interfaces. Using the example of windows (physical objects), they explain how the properties of modules can lead to innovation. Extensibility, replaceability, and adaptability are key features of good modules. By comparing gothic church windows to modern ones, the speaker demonstrates how innovation arises from modularity and draws parallels between modularity in both biological and man-made systems.
🦅 Evolution, Adaptation, and Exaptation in Innovation
This section delves into biological principles such as adaptation, evolution, and exaptation and draws connections to innovation. The speaker explains how traits (or modules) developed for one purpose (like bird feathers for heat regulation) can be repurposed for another (flight). They also introduce Gregor Mendel’s hereditary studies as a precursor to the understanding of genes and modularity in biology, likening genetic modification and organ transplants to the modularity concept in biological systems, which fosters innovation at multiple levels.
🧠 Modularity and Software Innovation: From Telecommunication to the Software Stack
The speaker shifts focus to modern technology, explaining how modularity in software and hardware has led to significant innovation. They explore how systems, like telecommunication networks, evolve through modular components, drawing parallels to biological systems. The concept of the software stack (e.g., LAMP stack) is introduced as an example of how individual, seemingly unrelated projects can combine to create powerful systems. This modularity allows for flexibility, extensibility, and the potential for innovation across industries.
🐍 Cambrian Period, Chordates, and Biological Innovation
The speaker returns to biology, discussing the Cambrian period, when major life forms and body plans (e.g., chordates) evolved, leading to a vast diversification of species. They compare biological evolution to engineering animals with modular parts and suggest that innovation happens when existing modules are separated into simpler units. By simplifying and recombining modules, innovation becomes possible in both biological systems and technological advancements. The speaker concludes with the idea that modularity is crucial to fostering innovation across all fields.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Complex systems
💡Modularity
💡Innovation
💡Specification
💡Eukaryotes and prokaryotes
💡Cambrian explosion
💡Self-organization
💡Adaptation
💡Exaptation
💡Biomimicry
Highlights
Complex systems are all around us, both natural and human-made, from biology to modern infrastructure.
The speaker discusses the evolution of biological systems and draws parallels to modern innovation, suggesting we can learn from biological evolution to design complex systems.
Every system has a specification, a model, and a realization that dictates how it functions and behaves.
Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the telephone started as a simple system and grew in complexity over time, showing that every innovation starts from an idea and evolves.
Multicellular organisms evolved rapidly during the Cambrian explosion due to modularity, which led to the development of diverse life forms.
The speaker introduces the concept of modularity as a key driver of innovation, both in biology and in technological systems.
Modularity allows for independent construction and replacement of system components, enabling flexibility, adaptability, and innovation.
Biological systems demonstrate adaptation, evolution, and exaptation—traits that can also apply to technological innovation.
Genes are seen as modular units that can be manipulated to transfer traits, which is the basis of genetic modification and biotechnology.
The speaker draws a connection between organ transplants and modularity, highlighting how understanding interfaces allows for the replacement of functional units.
Innovation occurs at multiple levels—from genes in biology to software and hardware in technology—demonstrating how modularity transcends fields.
Modular systems allow for economies of scale, enabling widespread use and development, as seen with software stacks like LAMP.
The speaker emphasizes that true innovation often involves taking an existing module, separating it into simpler parts, and repurposing it for new contexts.
In both biology and technology, innovation is driven by the assembly of complex systems from simpler, well-defined modules.
The closing premise is that modularity is key to innovation, allowing us to create anything imaginable by breaking down and reassembling systems.
Transcripts
good afternoon uh I'm here to talk in my
capacity as a computer scientist uh on
Innovation and I think that being
trained in computer science gives us
certain skills and i' like to talk about
that
today so complex systems are all around
us and if I go back to my proper slide
these systems have evolved over time of
uncounted Millennia and they have
structure their function their behavior
but increasingly today we are designing
even more complicated infrastructures
telecommunications Power Systems
Computing devices and I think we can
learn something from the way that
biology has evolved over millions and
billions of years to attend to that
task now when I look at a complex system
what I try to understand is what its
function
is like a clicker function and to focus
on this we start with the fact that
every system has a
specification every system has a model
the realization of that system and then
finally what it actually appears like in
practice now the first inventor of the
telephone Alexander granell decided he
want to talk remotely to another human
so it was a simple wire connecting two
rooms eventually that increased in
complexity to what we now know today but
ultimately there's still a realization
of that system that had to First be
envisioned by someone you might have a
need to govern a country so you design a
model framework and then that would be
your Constitution and then it actually
has to be carried out and realized by
people fulfilling different roles in the
109th Congress over there you may look
at life and say well is it really a
specification for a bald eagle do we
really need something to depopulate the
salmon from a stream well in fact the
model of that bird of prey is now stored
in DNA and so I can look that as a model
and try to understand through all these
systems that no matter what happens in a
complex system they need to innovate to
not only sustain themselves but to
thrive
and so we need to do a little history
and in computer science I don't get a
chance to do this much so bear with me
about three billion years ago life
formed on this planet and at the time we
now know those to be procaryotic cells
very simple unicellular organisms they
might form colonies and form association
with other entities but as in all rather
simple life at some point about a
billion years later came the UK carots
and they share so much in common it's
really intriguing from someone outside
the biological field uh looking at it
more from a point of view of information
and structure to see how much they have
in common and of course there are
differences uh some primary ones of the
scale 10 to 100 times larger the nucleus
uh and other specialized functions and
there are many theories as to how this
actually happened I prefer the endi
symbiotic formation theory that someone
suggest that these procaryotic cells
forming close association with each
other somehow became symbiotic and they
formed tighter relationships between
themselves so that the whole is greater
than the sum of the parts and so one
would think well this looks great now
that we have the basis for multicellular
organisms with increased specialization
everything should start to take off now
and we should see the great diversity in
life that we have today unfortunately it
didn't exactly happen and it had to way
to a certain point in time which we know
to be the Cambrian explosion about 540
million years ago and you might read
about this in the scientific literature
or the Scientific American the way I
found it was by Stephen J gold which any
book that he writes is by me um and in
there he describes this period in time
where about 90% of the Life as we know
it on this planet was in this model of
single cellular life and so what was it
what had to happen for that
multicellular life to somehow take root
and form these incredible diversities
well they have theories as scientists to
uh and I'm going to look at this one for
today's talk as sort of a basis for
modularity and why it plays such an
important role in Innovation somehow at
that time within 50 to 70 million years
all the major film on the planet seemed
to evolve the earliest ancestors and the
diverse life forms are incredible they
even have an animal here called hucog
genic they couldn't understand what it
was and at that time the best theory as
to what exactly happened is that somehow
the emergence of all these multicellular
organisms introduced a change context
and the scale changed just enough we've
heard earlier this concept of a Tipping
Point I think it's appropriate here that
these noop physical processes appeared
where before there was just regulation
genes for unicellular functions now took
over in an interesting product way not
just additive but true products to form
interesting New U processes and so the
morphological complexity that you see
appendages layers segments all appeared
from self-organization and so you have
an incredible diversity where it's true
that the whole is greater than the sum
of its
parts to return to a modern context
which is where I find myself more uh I
now need to talk about what a module is
now modules are in software they're in
Hardware but they also are more abstract
as we'll come to see so I'll just say
that a module is some unit of
functionality that has a well- defined
interface with this context so I'll take
a very simple example of Windows every
window is functional you can open it or
close it has certain structure what its
elements are has the behavior it
illuminates the room but could also be
used as a fire escape if you had to
although the The 14th Century window
there was probably not a good fire
escape um and in fact it has certain
elements that they have and if I look at
that rather simple system I try to
identify its functionality structure
behavior and that window in the gothic
church has certain physical properties
that's embedded in the wall uh and
that's very different from the more
modern window you see there and so
modules themselves are just these units
and so what I'm really looking at is
what are the good properties of module
that really change it and make it
something that leads to Innovation so I
broken these up into three groupings we
first start with this notion that if you
have a true module it can be
independently constructed and then
replace at will either by a new version
from the manufacturer or a third party
upstart that tries to replace it you
might have extensibility which we now
know as add-ons or there's an app for
that and you could also think about some
modules that would develop in one
context and you want to use it in a
totally different context that you would
never envisioned and if you look at
these two little window examples um the
window in the gothic church really comes
up poor in all these rankings it's not
replaceable uh it's not extensible there
not much you can do with it but the
modern window has all these really nice
features and while the one thing that
both fail on is this notion of taking a
window and using it in another context
um we will see examples of where that
actually is the case and so what I like
to do is to turn to the biology world
again to start with this notion that
well what we really have are three
distinct themes that we've seen in our
textbooks we'll start with adaptation
the ability to acquire trait and that's
just like a third party add-on and then
if that trait gets absorbed into a
population now you have true Evolution
we replace certain modules across a
wider sphere and finally this last
notion of exaptation which is this idea
that something developed for one purpose
can be taken over for used for another
you may at least be familiar with the
evolution of dinosaurs and birds it
turns out that many believe that bird
feathers were actually heat regulation
devices and then eventually they became
used for flight again a totally
different purpose but one that nature
took very good use of and so when I
think about these things uh let's go
back to genetics so we go to
1865 a monk in brunau in Czech Republic
who's working on his his hereditary
ideas and so he can understand that he
can pass certain traits from one
generation to the next p in this case
through successive breeding regimens
where he has a certain organism the
cultivar on their top right top and he's
got these certain beneficial genes he's
trying to pass on of course at the time
he had no notion that there were genes
or chromosomes he had this idea that
there were traits somehow being passed
on he could observe them without
understanding the mechanism or the
function
and through successive breeding programs
you can indeed have a desired codar that
you would get in the lower right hand
corner or you could take the modern root
biot technology shows that we can use
agrobacterium to transplant DNA
sequences into another organism this is
the basis of GMOs and genetically
modified organisms and so with a very
quick turnaround period you can take a
beneficial Gene that was used in one
totally different context and inject it
into an organism an entire different one
and yet you get the same result all this
is based on the concept of modularity
and without this basis there's no way
that I believe life would be able to
adapt and evolve because it's a
fundamental belief in chromosomes that
the modules are themselves genes but we
can also look at that from a point of
view of a macro perspective um when you
hear about uh organ transplants my first
thought is well they're just hacking the
body they didn't know what they were
doing when they were doing an organ
transplant they just said I wonder if
it's possible and every time I see a
heart transplant which seems so common
now you look at what's really happening
and I never understood how they could do
it because I was envisioning all these
nerve attachments that they had to
reattach but it turns out the human
heart has no external nerves you just
plug it in and then watch it work and so
they understood the interface of that
module and they were able to take
advantage of it to actually introduce
third party Replacements and of course
uh external add-ons like having a dial
pump or even an automatic lung
everything that the biologists are doing
now with this incredibly Rich stuff can
be seen as just I'm going to hack the
body I'm going to find a way to take
this Advantage advantage of this module
and introduce this as well so that
modularity can both be at the micro
model level but also at the physical
level the the larger system and in fact
I believe innovation has to happen at
all three levels otherwise you can't
actually see why you're trying to do the
things you're doing and that's a
specification just imagine every time
you learn a solit game someone said oh
this game is solit is just like Klondike
except you do this so you've got the
basic strategy well I've got my
understanding I'm just going to tweak
some of the rules treat them like a
module cut them out and put something
else in its place or the Constitution
you can just amend it just with a lot of
work but you can do it and then you now
have a new module that's attached to the
greater hole um in the actual physical
systems we can of course replace
function units all the time and again
going back to
telecommunications for the last 40 50
years you could still take a regular Cox
uh plug of a phone and plug into the
wall and you could still have access to
this interconnected uh Global Network
even though the actual hand that hadn't
changed much and what what it shows me
is that when you're looking at a system
of any capacity any level of of
hierarchy you can find modules that
themselves are broken down and possibly
it could be a very complex system itself
but if I treat it like a module then I
don't have to worry about those
complexities and so this principle of
modularity does extend all the way
throughout the entire system that you're
working on so the basic premise of my
talk today is while modularity may not
be the basis for Innovation it certainly
is A1 and and if I take as we now are
there's a term called biom biomimesis I
believe which is try to mimic what
nature does and so if you look at what's
understanding in the world how things
are built well let's go back to my
description of what happened in the
Cambrian time and now take it up to a
modern context now we're building system
for modules each one of which is
incredibly complicated and it's a change
context now on a spatial scale we' never
envisioned Global Communications uh and
Power Systems that are now
interconnected and these novel
computational processes are in fact made
possible because you have all these
functioning modules that are being
assembled in ways that they might never
have been envisioned before and so the
morphological complexity all these
different mobile apps web servers U
mainframe computers all taken advantage
of the fact that they have these great
powerful modules to do their work and so
I don't have time to go into all of
these but I'll just pick some of these
the main Innovation that comes up is
called well when you take a complex
system but in the future is just a
module and so you can kind of see that
the Paradigm of innovation is constantly
moving in that direction once you have a
well- defined interface as we talk about
an art discipline you can create all
these uh economies of scale just think
of all the people who trying to write an
iPhone app once the interface is defined
or prior to that a Facebook app the
second part of innovation that can be
described here is the systems the
softare that is being written and
traditionally as a computer scientist I
grew up writing software on my own
computer and then eventually you
realized you could EXP man it to the
world because of the internet and now
you made it available for anyone to
download and license it used to be the
case that Hardware manufacturers gave
away the software because they wanted
you to buy the hardware well now they
give away the hardware so they can
license you the software and as software
became more and more complex it
developed into this interesting area
called the software stack you may have
heard of the term it's nothing more than
a set of software that comes
pre-installed that has minimal external
dependencies and provides a substantial
function that you can then take and work
with without having to just reinvent the
Wheel from scratch and this gives
unprecedented productivity to our
software vendors I'm going to talk about
one of these you at least should at
least be aware of every time you go to a
website and you buy something in the
shopping cart you're probably using a
lamp software stack that company has
probably built a web server that's
running on top of a machine that's uses
the Linux operating system freely
available and they use maybe the Apache
web server to host those requests they
need to store the data they put into a
database but they don't want to buy one
one they'll just get the freely
available one my Sequel and they need to
do some Dynamic web pages they're not
going to buy something they'll just
program it in Pearl or python or PHP and
so these individual systems were not
envisioned for this this wasn't the
exogenesis of some long-standing idea
they were all individual projects that
just kind of grew up all at the same
time matured at the same time and before
you knew it you had this really
interesting I'm going to say symbiotic
relationship where they're all powerful
but they make the whole even more
interesting and Powerful as it goes
forward and so this LEDs me to try to
tie together these two parts of my talk
one that goes back a billion years and
one that's only 10 years old so in the
biological sciences of these domains
that what I remember from 8th grade and
so you could have the ARA and the
bacteria those are
procariota those are the ukar and
they've got all these great things going
back to lus and even earlier the philm
in the kingdom and it's really almost
romantic so in my mind I'm going to
propose let's have another domain we
call a computar and it repres all of
software and in this domain there are
different kingdoms I know about unia
that's all the software that developed
on a Linux platform and don't forget
mobilia that's what all the handheld
devices are Palm Pilots pdas Apple
iPhones and so in the future perhaps not
the not too distant future we may have
paleo comput much like our
paleontologist now trying to go through
the Forensic Record and really try to
understand well what is that lamp that
was there why was it so important why
did so many uh people use it and they
made may say well that's actually a
philm lampia in the unia kingdom and
it's not too far off from the truth
because if I go back to the Cambrian
Period again where the Coates evolved
somewhere around the 540 million Mark
they devolve this architecture which is
a a body plan that had you know
bilateral uh model and then you got a
head and tail rudimentary vertebrae and
this whole thing it's a very incredibly
diverse species of course but only 4%
are cordat in this and you can see the
vertebrae coming out of that the
reptiles the poor little mammals over
there who kind of come out and dominate
as we now know today and so when I look
at the chordates I see the cordate film
stack this is the way that you would
engineer an animal if you had all these
parts and so I wanted to leave you at
least with one thing because some
innovation of the heart thing the
capture how do you how do you innovate
well Daniel Parnes in our discipline has
identified the following when you're
trying to find a module or create a
module you should instead think about
separating a module that already exists
find a way to separate it up into two
parts so that the module a is actually
simpler because you separated stff out
into B and module B is not necessarily
more complicated and yet you can
Envision using b in a totally different
context and now you've got two modules
where before you had one true Innovation
is what I would say and so I'll leave
you with my final premise as I started
at the beginning modularity is the key
to Innovation and with that uh you can
do anything that you can imagine thank
you very much
Browse More Related Video
Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations
NEXT19 | James Bridle | New Dark Age: Is Technology Making the World Harder to Understand?
#1 Why verilog is a popular HDL | properties of verilog Language
Why computer engineering is like standup comedy: Wayne Cotter at TEDxRainier
1-3 What is Software Engineering
Kareem Yusuf: The importance of emotional tone in the digital age
5.0 / 5 (0 votes)