Artists play an equal role with research scientists in the futuristic research “collaboratory” being assembled by astrophysicist Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, a $400 million research consortium assembled over the last five years.

One current project is to create a pack of “feral” robotic dogs with artificial intelligence capabilities and let them loose in a San Diego neighborhood. The robots could be assigned some socially useful function, like searching for or “sniffing out” pollution.