Lecture 10: Future trends

This lecture, which I hosted at the from the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, recaps the whole 2013 series and looks at the future of AI, Robotics and …the Shanghai Lectures themselves :-)

“How the body shapes the way we think – principles and insights ” by Rolf Pfeifer

In yet another great lecture, Rolf summarizes the main ideas and concepts we have reviewed in the Shanghai Lectures. Check here for his thought-stimulating insights:

Guest lecture: “Autonomous Service Robots that Can Ask for Help” by Manuela Veloso

In this guest lecture Prof. Manuela Veloso, very appropriately H. A. Simon Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, gives us a compressed survey of her research. She also shows us  how we may work around current limitations of AI and Robotics by simply letting robots ask for our help! What does she mean by this? Watch her lecture here:

Manuela Veloso is President of AAAI, past president of the RoboCup Federation, and a fellow of IEEE, AAAI and AAAS.

That’s all, folks, for 2013! Stay tuned, the best is yet to come!

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 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.

In this second lecture hosted by the Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Matteo Cianchetti builds on the previous lecture to talk about building soft actuators for soft robots. In Matteo’s lecture, titled “Soft actuator design methods“,  he explains that the devil is in the details, but that it’s possible to build soft actuators by insightfully exploiting the properties of Shape Memory Alloy (SMA). Want to learn how?

Guest Lecture – “Can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ cause a paradigm shift?” by Minoru Asada

In this talk Prof. Minoru Asada from the University of Osaka, in Japan, shows the results and discusses the underlying principles of his research on developmental robotics and the of the psychological development of the basic human cognitive functions in the baby and even in the fetus! This is an iconic example of synthetic methodology application.

How can we simulate the development of a fetus, for example? And above all, can ‘Synthetic Methodology’ really cause a paradigm shift? Watch Asada’s  lecture here:

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.

Hosted by Prof. Cecilia Laschi from the Scuola Superiore S. Anna in Pisa, Italy, this ShanghAI episode puts together contrasting approaches to ‘embodied intelligence’ and ‘embodied cognition’ in her lecture titled “How an octopus can help build a robot”.

Laschi, who among many other things has coordinated the European ‘Octopus’ project,  shows a radical approach to embodiment starting from the bottom-up, by taking us through the development of the physical soft structure of a robot octopus. Soft robotics has a lot to say about embodied cognition and morphological computation, and also involves several non-trivial engineering challenges. Can building an artificial octopus really help to advance robotics? Don’t miss Cecilia Laschi’s lecture:

Guest Lecture – “From scene segmentation to task based grasping” by Danica Kragic

In this talk Prof. Danica Kragic from the KTH in Stockolm, Sweden shows the benefits of embodiment to grasping – from a top-down approach based on computer vision, machine learning and AI. Kragic has led the Grasp european project, and is a leading researcher in the area of AI and robotics. Whatever DARPA tells you, the problem of grasping still isn’t solved. For example we still don’t have a robot that is able to take the dishes from a real world sink and put them into a dishwasher (this would be a killer application, do you agree?) How long will we have to wait?

A top-down approach to solving ‘real problems’ within the embodied approach to AI and robotics still has several basic research questions to answer. If you have been following the previous lectures you may have noticed that many researchers are approaching the issue of embodied cognition with sometimes very different methods and models, and a synthesis at the level of concrete mathematical models is still missing.

The good news is that we may be on right path. Find out what Kragic has to say on the matter:

Guest Lecture – “Hard Work for Robotics from Soft Actuators” by Bram Vanderborght

Soft robots need soft actuators, and building soft actuators is not a trivial task. Prof. Bram Vanderborght is with the Vrije University Brussels and does cutting-edge research on soft actuators, in particular in legged locomotion of humanoid robots. Dive into the modeling and engineering challenges and subtle solutions presented by Bram Vanderborght in 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.

Lecture 4 – Evolution: Cognition from scratch

If you believe that it’s too difficult to develop the mathematical models required to arrive at a new concept of embodied AI and robotics, this lecture will offer you hope. In her talk, Prof. Verena Hafner, from Humboldt University in Berlin, discusses the concept of ‘body maps’ from an embodied intelligence perspective, and shows how they can emerge from sensorimotor flow, through information distances in the data flow and/or an internal simulation. In this context the ‘body map’ is not a symbolic ‘representation’ of the agent’s body, but rather an emerging structure used by the agent in its interaction with its environment.

“Creating body maps” by Verena Hafner

“Evolution: cognition from scratch” by Rolf Pfeifer

In the second talk, Rolf Pfeifer shows how evolutionary processes at different time scales drive the development of embodied intelligence in nature, and how they can be mimicked (with surprisingly good results) for the development of artificial systems, including … pipes and antennas!

How can we exploit Gene Regulatory Networks for the development of a new paradigm for robots?

Guest Lecture – “How can we test for artificial life? Complexity and computation in Nature” by Hector Zenil

An unlikely yellow ‘computer’?

The skeptics will think that certain concepts such as ‘life’ or ‘self-organization’ are too  elusive and ill-defined to be useful to AI. Hector Zeni, from the Karolinska Institute in Stockolm, Sweden, does cutting-edge research on the applications of Algorithmic Information Theory to the modeling of life and cognition. Witness how AIT might come to the rescue with this lecture, also hosted by Humboldt University Berlin …

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 3 – Cognition and embodiment – Language learning in children and robots: A developmental robotics approach 

This week’s lecture discusses an important problem: how ‘symbols’ and language emerge and are ‘grounded’ from the flow of sensory-motor data. In this lecture, Angelo Cangelosi, Director of the Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems at the University of Plymouth, explains the developmental approach to robotics (and psychology) and offers a remarkable example of ‘synthetic methodology’  for the study of children’s intellectual development.  Cangelosi, who’s original background is in psychology, is a leading researcher in developmental robotics.

Do you want to know what ‘gavagai’ means? And why this is an important issue? Watch the video:

Notice the experiments on the emergence of natural number from sensory-motor data flow.  Aren’t they intriguing? Do you remember ‘Where mathematics come from?’ by Lakoff and Nuñez? You may also check Nuñez’ s lectures in the ShanghAI archive!

This year the ShanghAI Lectures have been more ‘distributed’ than they had been in the past. While Rolf and I have developed the main ideas for the embodied cognition approach to AI and Robotics following the approach described in ‘How the Body Shapes the Way We Think’, in our text book we have devoted significant space to describing overlapping perspectives of embodied cognition from different researchers. Some lectures have been ‘hosted’  sites other than Madrid or Zurich. This was the first lecture broadcast by the University of Plymouth.

Guest Lecture – “Does Robotics Really Need Embodiment?” by Vincent Mueller

What we usually refer to as ‘embodiment’ is not the trivial concept that ‘intelligence needs a body’. The epistemological problems raised by the ‘embodiment’ and the ‘synthetic methodology’ approaches are not trivial either. In this talk, Vincent Mueller plays the devil’s advocate:

Vincent Mueller is a philosopher with the Anatolia College Thessaloniki and the University of Oxford. He is the coordinator of euCogIII, the largest and most important European network cognition science researchers. With almost 1000 members, euCogIII spans many disciplines, including AI, neuroscience and philosophy.

Guest Lecture – “Morphological Computation and Soft Robotics” by Helmut Hauser

A central aspect of ’embodied intelligence’ or ’embodied cognition’ is the the fact that part of the ‘control’ is offloaded to the physical dynamics of the agent, in what is called  ‘morphological computation’. In order to exploit morphological computation in the development of artificial cognitive agents, and to better understand its role in natural intelligence, quantitative models are needed. In this lecture  Helmut Hauser proposes a possible model, and also shows how issues related to morphological computation are intertwined with soft robot modeling.

Helmut Hauser is with the AI Lab of the University of Zurich and is one of the few people who dares to look for quantitative models of morphological computation (another one is …myself :-)).

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.

In the next coming weeks we will release all the lectures of the 2013 Edition, including remarks and insights. Don’t miss them!

Watch Thursday’s live stream here …

https://arcamm.uc3m.es/arcamm/uc3mtv/directo.php?ID=16

Agenda (all times in CET)

December 19th 2013
Lecture 10 : Future Trends
09:30 Fabio Bonsignorio: Welcome and introduction
09:35 Rolf Pfeifer:
How the body shapes the way we think – principles and insights
10:25 Manuela Veloso: Autonomous Service Robots that Can Ask for Help
11:00 Break
11:10 Panel: W.Chen, V.Mueller, R.Pfeifer, M.Veloso, V.Zabotkina
11:10 Panel: Q1: Does AI need embodiment?
11:40 Panel: Q2: The future of the ShanghAI lectures and education on natural and artificial intelligence
12:10 Good  bye! See you in 2014!

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.

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

The 2013 edition presented guest lectures by some of the frontier researchers on natural and artificial intelligence, including a glimpse at artificial and synthetic life:

• Minoru Asada (Osaka University)
• Josh Bongard (University of Vermont)
• Angelo Cangelosi (Universty of Plymouth)
• Luisa Damiano (University of Bergamo)
• Tamar Flash (Weizmann Institute)
• Helmut Hauser (University of Zurich)
• Danica Kragic (KTH)
• Yasuo Kuniyoshi (University of Tokyo)
• Pedro Lima (IST Lisbon)
• Luigi Luisi (Roma Tre University)
• Giorgio Metta (IIT)
• Vincent Mueller (Anatolia College and Oxford University)
• Kevin O’Regan (Paris Descartes/CNRS/ENS)
• Bram Vanderborght (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
• Manuela Veloso (CMU)
• Hector Zenil (Karolinska Institutet)

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 are 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 work together on the exercises, using Webots by Cyberbotics, and Ludobots by the University of Vermont.

They differ from ‘conventional’ MOOCs as they exploit telecommunication technology to build a global 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.