Join an audience at swissnex San Francisco as scientists from Switzerland and the US discuss their research on humanoid robots, cognitive robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI). Hear how some robots self-reflect, self-improve, and adapt to new circumstances, and whether it’s possible for robots of the future to possess the same cognitive characteristics as humans. Cornell University’s Hod Lipson is seeking to understand if machines can learn analytical laws automatically. Lipson has developed machines that take in information about their environment and discover natural laws all on their own, even learning to walk. Rolf Pfeifer directs the Artificial Intelligence Lab at the University of Zurich. Together with his scientific assistant Pascal Kaufmann, Pfeifer presents current AI research and a humanoid robot in the Ecce family referred to as Cronos. Instead of copying only the outward form of a human, Cronos mimics the inner structures as well—bones, joints, muscles, and tendons—and thus has more human-like actions and interactions in the world."
Bio
Pascal Kaufmann
Pascal Kaufmann graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), receiving his master's degree in biology with a specialization in neuroscience. He carries out research at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Oerlikon, focusing on biological and artificial neural networks, consciousness research, cyborg technology, and know-how trading. He is also founder, CEO, and chairman of the board of directors of Starmind, which gives companies access to latest artificial intelligence technology.
Hod Lipson
In 2001, Hod Lipson joined the departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the faculty of Computing and Information Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is also a member of the Computer Science and Computational Biology graduate fields at Cornell. Prior to this appointment, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Brandeis University's Computer Science Department and a Lecturer in MIT's Mechanical Engineering Department. He received his Ph.D. in 1998 from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology. Before joining academia, he spent several years as a research engineer in the mechanical, electronic, and software industries.
Rolf Pfeifer
Rolf Pfeifer received his master's degree in physics and mathematics and his Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie-Mellon University and at Yale University. Since 1987, he has been a professor of computer science in the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich and Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Pfeifer worked as a visiting professor and research fellow at Free University of Brussels (Belgium), the Beijing Open Laboratory for Cognitive Science (China), the MIT Artificial Intelligence laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, California, and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. He was elected the 21st Century COE Professor of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo, Japan, for 2003/2004, from where he held the first global, fully interactive, videoconferencing-based lecture series "The AI Lectures from Tokyo." In 2009, he was elected as a Fellow of the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo. He is a visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, Italy, and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China.
Cornell University professor Hod Lipson demonstrates how a robot can teach itself to walk without any knowledge of its form and function. "Within a relatively small number of these babbling actions, it will figure out what it looks like," Lipson says. He adds that eventually "it can figure out how to move."
Ability of a machine to perform tasks thought to require human intelligence. Typical applications include game playing, language translation, expert systems, and robotics. Although pseudo-intelligent machinery dates back to antiquity, the first glimmerings of true intelligence awaited the development of digital computers in the 1940s. AI, or at least the semblance of intelligence, has developed in parallel with computer processing power, which appears to be the main limiting factor. Early AI projects, such as playing chess and solving mathematical problems, are now seen as trivial compared to visual pattern recognition, complex decision making, and the use of natural language. See alsoTuring test.
Design, construction, and use of machines (robots) to perform tasks done traditionally by human beings. Robots are widely used in such industries as automobile manufacture to perform simple repetitive tasks, and in industries where work must be performed in environments hazardous to humans. Many aspects of robotics involve artificial intelligence; robots may be equipped with the equivalent of human senses such as vision, touch, and the ability to sense temperature. Some are even capable of simple decision making, and current robotics research is geared toward devising robots with a degree of self-sufficiency that will permit mobility and decision-making in an unstructured environment. Today's industrial robots do not resemble human beings; a robot in human form is called an android.
