In general, as any robotics and/or AI PhD student knows very well, replicating the research results of other labs is quite difficult. The information you can customary find in a reputed journal paper is usually not enough to reproduce the experimental results claimed by the authors, let alone to make comparisons of the strengths and weaknesses of the different methods proposed in the literature in term of performances.

This is a serious issue, as the possibility to reproduce results is the cornerstone of the scientific method. Science is defined by the possibility to experimentally verify, Karl Popper would say ‘falsify’, ‘theories’. This is even more striking when at least part of robotics research is more and more regarded as ‘science,’ as for example, it is witnessed by the recent launch by AAAS with the new journal Science Robotics. By the way, what’s a ‘theory’ in robotics and AI?

This uncomfortable situation not only makes the cumulative process of research difficult, it also severely impairs technology transfer and industrial exploitation. It is worth noting that while everybody includes a state-of-the-art section in grant applications or business plans, the sad truth is that state-of-the-art is (more or less) insightfully guessed as published results cannot in many, if not most, cases be checked objectively.

And what about the TRLs (Technology Readiness Levels) at the core of SPARC Strategic Research Agenda? The community has been aware of this problem for a long time. In 2008, the European Robotics Network (EURON) started a Special Interest Group on Good Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking (coordinated by me and co-chaired by John Hallam and Angel P. Del Pobil), and the following year within IEEE RAS, the TC Pebras started, that is still active today. In 2012, the Euron GEM SIG led to the establishment by euRobotics aisbl of the Topic Group on Replicable Robotics Research, Benchmarking and Competition, which I coordinate.

Series of workshops at IROS, ICRA and RSS have debated the related issues and proposed examples of reproducible experiments and measurable results. We are now at a point where we can provide concrete directions and guidelines for reproducible research in robotics and AI. In September 2015, the first ever “Special Issue on Reproducible Robotics Research” was published in the IEEE RAS Robotics and Automation Magazine. Reproducible research is becoming an IEEE priority, there are no more excuses to indulge in ‘proof by video’ and ‘it worked once in my lab’ attitudes.

Please check the links below if you want to learn more.

1. Bonsignorio F., Del Pobil A., (Eds.), Replicable and Measurable Robotics Research, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 22(3), 2015 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7254310
2. Bonsignorio F., del Pobil A.P.,Toward Replicable and Measurable Robotics Research [From the Guest Editors], Robotics & Automation Magazine, 22 (3), 32-35, 2015 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=7254280&punumber=100
3. Stoelen M. F. , de Tejada V. F., Huete A. J., Balaguer C., Bonsignorio F., Distributed and Adaptive Shared Control Systems: Methodology for the Replication of Experiments, IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 22(4),137âAS146, 2015 http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7307132/
4. The IEEE RAS TC Pebras website: http://www.ieee-ras.org/performance-evaluation
5. The Euron GEM Sig website page still listing related events http://www.heronrobots.com/EuronGEMSig/gem-sig-events

In this video lecture Fabio Bonsignorio talks about novel ideas that might just lead to a paradigm change robotics that will allow us to apply robot systems to natural environments, and not just factories where systems are operated and controlled by professionals. He believes that the solution to building robotic systems that can intuitively adapt to uncontrolled environments requires more than just technology; we will also need to figure out how to spend less computing power and rely more on cognitive knowledge extracted from network interaction physical agents.

So how do we do that? Watch Bonsignorio’s presentation to learn more about his novel approach to intelligent systems. (You can download the full .pptx presentation here.)

Fabio Bonsignorio is the founder and CEO of Heron Robots as well as an affiliate professor at the Biorobotics Institute (Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy).

For more than twenty years he has worked in the R&D departments of Italian and US companies, such as Elsag- BM in CIM (Computer Integrated Manufacturing), ORSI Automazione, Imation, cooperating with, for example, E&Y and Oracle. He is author and co-author of  more the 100 publications in the areas of robotics, cognition and manufacturing systems.

Prof. Bonsignorio is interested in foundational and epistemological issues in (embodied) cognition and robotics, while chasing viable real world applications. He is a member of IEEE/RAS, AAAI, CLAWAR, and euCognition. He coordinated the EURON Special Interest Group on Good Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking in Robotics, and is now the coordinator of the euRobotics TG on Benchmarking the Competition, as well as co chairing the IEEE RAS TC-Pebras. He is the coordinator of the ShanghaiLectures, www.shanghailectures.org.

Bonsignorio F. IJARS Video Series: New AI and Robotics [online video]. International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2015, 12:V1. DOI: 10.5772/60398

If you liked this lecture, you may also be interested in:

• ShanghAI Lectures: Josh Bongard “Morphological Change in Machines Accelerates the Evolution of Robust Behavior”
• ShanghAI Lectures: Fabio Bonsignorio “Embodied Finance: Embodying Disruptive Innovation in Embodied Cognitive Systems”
• 30 years of AI with Rolf Pfeifer: A robotics legend delivers his farewell talk

See all the latest robotics news on Robohub, or sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-03

In this guest lecture, Fabio Bonsignorio from University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, talks about issues with innovation and robotic startup companies.

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence, run and organized by Rolf Pfeifer (from 2009 till 2012), Fabio Bonsignorio (since 2013), and me with partners around the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GUcpvPSSxU

Fabio Bonsignorio is founder and CEO of Heron Robots, a company active in the development of advanced robotics solutions. From September 2009 he is a professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid (www.uc3m.es, roboticslab.uc3m.es) as Santander Chair of Excellence in Robotics. He has been working in the R&D departments of several major Italian and American companies, mainly in the applications of intelligent systems and technology transfer with cordination/management responsibilities for some 20 years. He held academic research positions on robotics and lectured in robotics, industrial control systems and machine design at the Department of Mechanics of the University of Genova. He is author or co-author of about 40 publications in the areas of robotics, cognition and manufacturing systems in the last three years, since he became an almost full time researcher. His first paper on robot control dates back to 1985.

He is puzzled by foundational and epistemological issues in (embodied) cognition and robotics, while chasing viable real world applications. He is a member of IEEE/RAS, AAAI, CLAWAR, and euCognition. He coordinates the EURON Special Interest Group on Good Experimental Methodology and Benchmarking in Robotics and is a board member of EURON III.

The ShanghAI Lectures have brought us a treasure trove of guest lectures by experts in robotics. You can find the whole series from 2012 here. Now, we’re bringing you the guest lectures you haven’t yet seen from previous years, starting with the first lectures from 2009 and releasing a new guest lecture every Thursday until all the series are complete. Enjoy!

Lecture 9: Towards a theory of intelligence

This lecture, which I hosted at the the University Carlos III (Madrid, Spain), suggests principles and design guidelines for the development of embodied intelligent systems that are more similar to animal-like intelligence than what has been proposed so far. How to build a self-organizing embodied intelligence? It’s a difficult challenge, but you may find some clues here:

Guest lecture: “Evolution of Morphological Complexity” by Josh Bongard

In this guest lecture Prof. Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont (USA) shows how the evolution of morphological complexity we observe in nature can actually be reproduced in artificial simulated computational models, and gives us some insights on the very core issues of embodied intelligence. Curious? Watch his talk:

Guest lecture: “Developing intelligence in humanoid robots” by Giorgio Metta

Prof. Giorgio Metta, the Director of the iCub facitily at the IIT, Genova (Italy) shows how the problem of developing cognitive capabilities in a robo-toddler is approached on the popular iCub platform. The iCub is now used by many labs around the world as a test-rig for the study of embodied intelligence. An example was given by Angelo Cangelosi, from the University of Plymouth in one the earlier lectures of this year’s ShanghAI edition.  Learn about the development of intelligence in robot babies here:

Guest lecture: “From Embodied Intelligence To Fetal Development – A Quest for The Fundamentals of Humanoid Intelligence” by Yasuo Kuniyoshi

An even more radical approach to the study of developmental learning in embodied systems (based on the synthetic methodology) is pursued by Prof. Yasuo Kuniyoshi, from the University of Tokyo. Kuniyoshi is an outstanding researcher in robotics and embodied intelligence. If you wish to really understand intelligence, perhaps you should begin with the fetus…  Don’t miss this strange but fascinating talk:

This lecture hosted by Prof. Samia Nefti-Meziani from the University of Salford, Manchester, UK, is about higher education and industrial impact of the ‘ShanghAI paradigm’. You should not be surprised to see early glimpses of the next industrial revolution enabled by intelligent machines in Manchester – this was the iconic example of industrial city during the very first industrial revolution.

“ITN Marie Curie Network SMART-E: Advanced Robotics for Sustainable Manufacturing in Europe” by  Samia Nefti-Meziani

Prof. Samia Nefti-Meziani shows how robotics and AI/cognition can concretely help in both industry and in everyday life. She also announces the newly funded research network on the application of the Shanghai concepts to the industrial world – making this lecture more than just an ‘Academic chat’. Want to know more? Watch Samia’s lecture:

Guest lecture: “Robotics at Festo – From Bionics to Industrial & Educational Robots” by Dirk Pensky

Dr. Pensky is a high-level manager at Festo, which is headquartered in Germany. In this guest lecture he shows us the ubercool bioinspired robotics systems developed by his company. If you want to stay informed on his cutting-edge research, watch his talk:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

In this lecture, hosted at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, I show how it is possible to ground ‘understanding’ on data streams coming from the physical interaction of an agent in the environment, and discuss the many open issues that remain. For example, setting information theory in an embodied framework is challenging, but the road ahead looks promising. So, what’s the link between locomotion to cognition? Is there one? Check out the lecture:

“Motor primitives and compositionality: From humans to the Octopus” by Tamar Flash

There is more to motion learning and planning in humans and animals than is usually thought. Some weird mathematics such as Lie algebras seem to shed some understanding on motion planning in animals (humans included), and could help toward the devlopment of robotics systems that are similar to natural embodied intelligent agents. Prof. Flash, from the Dept. of Applied Math. and Computer Science at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel does research on motor control in humans and robotic systems. Her current interest is in investigating the neural control of flexible hyper-redundant arms in the Octopus. Want to learn more? Have a look here:

Prof. Flash is from the Dept. of Applied Math. and Computer Science, The Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.

Guest Lecture – “Autopoiesis” by Luisa Damiano

Philosopher Luisa Damiano, Associate Researcher in Philosophy of Science at the Research Center on Complex Systems (CERCO) of the University of Bergamo and founder of the Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial Research Group (ESARG), takes a critical look at ‘synthetical methodology’ and looks beyond the context of robotics AI/cognition to include ‘Autopoiesis’ – a concept introduced by Maturana and Varela in the epistemology of Life Sciences. Curious about ‘synthetic methodology’ outside robotics and cognition? Do you want to know what ‘Autopoiesis’ means? See here:

Guest Lecture – “The two souls of synthetic biology: Experimental approaches” by Luigi Luisi

What is a minimum set living system? Why are certain proteins used in natural living systems but not others? Couldn’t it just be by ‘contingency’? Professor Pier Luigi Luisi is a leading researcher in synthetic biology, and his latest book is called The Emergence of Life: From Chemical Origins to Synthetic Biology. He is currently writing a book with Fritjof Capra. Watch Luisi’s lecture:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

Lecture 7 – Design principles of intelligent systems

This lecture, which I hosted at the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, looks at the foundational issues and the successes and failures of AI from a critical perspective. It details the novel principles discussed in Rolf Pfeifer’s and Josh Bongard’s  book ‘How the body shapes the way we think’ , the importance of considering the full embodied agent, the necessity of self-organization, and questions more recent AI successes, such as IBM Watson.

“Making robots that really feel” by Kevin O’Regan

Prof. O’ Regan, former director of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, CNRS, Université Paris Descartes, in France, is a leading researcher on perception. He questioned established notions of the nature of visual perception and predicted, with collaborators, the phenomenon of “change blindness”. His current work involves exploring the empirical consequences of a new “sensorimotor” approach to vision and sensation in general.

In this talk he discusses the implications and perspectives of ‘phemomenal consciousness’. What colour is ‘red’? Why doesn’t red ‘sound like a bell’? Watch Kevin’s talk:

Guest Lecture – “Visual Servo Control of Cable-Driven Soft Robotic Manipulator” by Hesheng Wang

In previous talks we explored issues of designing  soft robot arm. In this talk Prof. Wang from the Autonomous Robot Lab at the Shanghai Jiao Tong University shows how to control them:

You may notice that the approach is fairly classic, and that we are still lacking the models to do it from a morphological computation and self-organization standpoint – although I and some of the other ShanghAI lecturers have some ideas about how to do this.

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

This week we publish the second of the

Lecture 2 – Embodied Intelligence

“Evolution embodies information in every part of every organism. … This information doesn’t have to be copied into the brain at all. It doesn’t have to be “represented” in “data structures” in the nervous system. It can be exploited by the nervous system, however, which is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information in the hormonal systems just as it is designed to rely on, or exploit, the information embodied in your limbs and eyes.” – D.Dennett, Kind of Minds, 1996

 

Many people will probably agree with Dennett from a philosophical standpoint, but what are the implications for robotics research and robot development?

There are many: What is the Frame-of-Reference problem? How we can get rid of it in principle? How can we get rid of it in practice?

Unfortunately,  the real world doesn’t come with labels. How can we associate symbols with a continuous stream of sensory stimulation? What is the cognitive role of physical interaction of the agent with the world? Check Rolf’s lecture to inspire your thoughts.

Guest Lecture – “From Bio-Inspired to Institutional-Inspired Collective Robotics” by Pedro Lima

The implications of the embodied intelligence paradigm are wide and deep.

In this talk Pedro Lima, from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal, shows how  human institutions can be seen as emerging processes in swarms of embodied intelligent agents, a.k.a. ‘robots’. This view has some implication on the economic sciences, too. In Portugal they are sensitive to ‘economics paradigms’ and know that current ones have some flaws :-). On the other hand an ‘institutional-inspired’ approach seems quite beneficial also for network robot development.

Intriguing, right? Watch the full lecture here:

Pedro Lima, is a professor at IST and a leading researcher in robotics and AI, and above all he is a nice guy and a subtle and deep thinker!

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.

This week marks the launch of the ShanghAI Lectures 2013 Edition on Robohub — we will release a new lecture from this series every Monday until the series is complete. Please use the comments section below to send us your questions, and we will do our best to respond! You can learn more about the ShanghAI lectures here.

Lecture 1 – Intelligence: Things can be seen differently

If you are not interested in precisely predicting the motion of a handful of ‘anomalous’ stars (nowadays known as planets), then there is no reason to assume that the earth is not sitting at the center of the universe. Ptolemaic astronomy was good astronomy, after all. And if you were an astronomer of the XVI century you may have had good reason to think that ‘solving astronomy’ was simply a matter of adding the ‘right’ epicycles ;-). Many did. Why worry about just five stars that do not model correctly when there are several thousand stars that are perfectly predictable?

AI and Robotics have been very successful in the past fifty years, thanks to Google, IBM Watson, SIRI or Da Vinci, Opportunity, Bosto … oops Google again ;-). Yet something is still missing …

With all the due ‘caveats’, the first lecture of the 2013 ShanghAI series insinuates the doubt that we might be in a similar situation as regards AI and Robotics … that a paradigm change might be necessary in order to be able to build ‘real’ robots that are more similar to those dreamed by Hollywood, and that this new paradigm should be more similar to the massively multi-agent, self organizing, biological processes, exploiting ‘morphological computation’ than to the Good Old Fashioned top down ‘Cartesian’ paradigm, maybe with some machine learning in addition (modern ‘epicycles’?).

Are you intrigued? Do you wildly disagree? Check out the first lecture and learn about all the 2013 participants in the 2013 inaugural lecture:

About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was essentially viewed as information processing taking place in the brain, the more recent insight that interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism — an idea that has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights, but which has not so far been widely exploited in industry practice.

The ShanghAI Lectures project aims to:

• Build a sustainable community of students and researchers in the area of Embodied Intelligence
• Make education and knowledge on cutting-edge scientific topics accessible to everyone
• Explore novel methods of knowledge transfer
• Overcome the complexity of a multi-cultural and interdisciplinary learning context
• Bring global teaching to a new level

These lectures about Natural and Artificial Intelligence have been held via videoconference at the University Carlos III of Madrid in Spain, the University of Zurich in Switzerland, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna of Pisa, Italy, Humboldt University Berlin in Germany, University of Plymouth and University of Salford in the UK, and 10 other universities around the globe. Students from the participating universities are still working together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

The lectures have also been streamed to allow remote participation to anybody.

The ShanghAI Lectures differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global, distributed lecture hall that allows rich interaction rather than simply implementing the good old fashioned TV broadcasting model on a different medium. They also differ from other AI courses as they propose a new paradigm approach to embodied cognition (a.k.a. AI and Robotics). It is a kind of Copernican revolution with respect to GOFAI and its robotics application — and thus a research program for the coming decades.

This year I coordinated the lectures, with help from Prof. Rolf Pfeifer and Dr. Nathan Labhart at the University of Zurich . Rolf Pfeifer and I provided the context (introduction, moderation, and conclusion). As always, there were 2-3  invited guest lectures each week.