Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-11-17

In this guest lecture, Josh Bongard from the University of Vermont (USA) and co-author of How the body shapes the way we think (MIT Press), talks about bio-inspired robotics and how engineering may benefit from evolutionary robotics and morphological scaffolding.

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=mykg2KpT87A

Slides

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:

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.

Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2009-11-19

If the body plays a central role in intelligence, as a roboticist, how do we choose an appropriate body for our robot? Evolutionary robotics allows us to automatically optimize the physical layout of our robots as we also optimize their controllers. In this talk I will demonstrate how selecting or evolving an appropriate robot body can (1) simplify control, (2) make seemingly difficult tasks easier, (3) increase evolvability, (4) provide new behaviors, (5) facilitate the extraction of information from the environment, (6) generate new research questions, and (7) improve scalability.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2B0oJyBfF8

The ShanghAI Lectures are a videoconference-based lecture series on Embodied Intelligence run by Rolf Pfeifer and organized by me and partners around the world.

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!