Imagine a swarm of microscopic robots that we inject into the vascular system: the swarm swims to the source of the problem, then either delivers therapeutics or undertakes microsurgery directly. That was how I opened a short invited talk at the Royal Society of Medicine, at a meeting themed The Future of Robotics in Surgery.
Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2011-12-15
Watch Rolf Pfeifer’s farewell lecture at the University of Zurich, broadcasting live on Robohub Friday May 23, 2014 (18:00–19:30 CEST/16:00–17:30 UTC).
One of the most prominent figures in the “embodied intelligence” approach to AI, and the intellectual father of the Roboy humanoid, Rolf Pfeifer and his Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab) at the University of Zurich have been a force of influence on the fields of robotics and AI for almost 30 years.
Guest talk in the ShanghAI Lectures, 2010-12-16
The lecture starts with a short introduction to the Interactive Robots and Media Lab and the United Arab Emirates. Then, it continues by exploring some basic requirements towards creating Situated Conversational Assistants, i.e. devices with sensing, actuation, and spoken natural language which can assist humans in various tasks.
I’ve been talking about robot ethics for several years now, but that’s mostly been about how we roboticists must be responsible and mindful of the societal impact of our creations. Two years ago I wrote – in my Very Short Introduction to Robotics – that robots cannot be ethical. Since then I’ve completely changed my mind*. I now think there is a way of making a robot that is at least minimally ethical. It’s a huge technical challenge which, in turn, raises new ethical questions. For instance: if we can build ethical robots, should we? Must we..? Would we have an ethical duty to do so? After all, the alternative would be to build amoral robots. Or, would building ethical robots create a new set of ethical problems? An ethical Pandora’s box.
Many surgeries today are performed as open, invasive procedures because surgeons lack the right tools. Our goal is to create the technology that will enable converting these open procedures to minimally invasive ones.
– Dr. Pierre Dupont, Chief of Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering at Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School.
TED just released an excellent talk by Michael Dickinson from the University of Washington about how flies fly.
September 14, 2021
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