How the body shapes the way we think: Rolf Pfeifer at TEDxZurich

TEDx Talks

Traditionally, in disciplines like artificial intelligence, robotics, and neuroscience, intelligence is viewed as located in the brain and as a consequence, there has been a focus on the study of the brain itself or more generally, the control. Recently, especially with the rise of biologically inspired approaches, there has been increasing consensus that intelligence is not localized in the brain, but is distributed throughout the entire organism, and that it is the result of an intricate relation between brain, body, and environment. Rolf Pfeifer demonstrates that by studying the brain or the control alone, nothing whatsoever can be inferred about the behavior of the system — biological or artificial — unless we know how the brain (or the control) is embedded into the physical system. The talk ends with a demonstration of tendon-driven humanoid “”Roboy”” and his basic skills.

Rolf Pfeifer holds a Master’s degree in physics and mathematics and Ph.D. in computer science (1979) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. Three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie-Mellon and at Yale University in the US. Since 1987: professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Visiting professor and research fellow at the Free University of Brussels, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, the Beijing Open Laboratory for Cognitive Science, and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. Elected “21st Century COE Professor, Information Science and Technology” at the University of Tokyo in 2004. In 2009: visiting professor at the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China; appointed “Fellow of the School of Engineering” at the University of Tokyo.

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