About the ShanghAI Lectures

While in the classical approach “intelligence” was viewed essentially as information processing taking place in the brain, more recently the insight that the interaction with the environment is of central importance is gaining increasing acceptance. This has led to the metaphor of embodiment, i.e., that intelligence is always a property of an entire organism. This idea has far-reaching implications and often leads to surprising insights.

This lecture series, consisting of ten videoconference sessions of roughly two hours (including a short break) and a seventh session of about 3 hours, provides a systematic introduction to the concept of embodiment (“Embodied Intelligence”). The implications of an embodied view on intelligence are not only of a scientific nature but lead to a completely different way of how we view ourselves and the world around us. Examples and illustrations will be taken from humans, animals, and engineering (robotics in particular) and are intended to demonstrate that things can always be seen differently from what we would normally expect.

Using the method of “understanding by building”, the lectures provide a set of design principles that on the one hand enable a better understanding of biological systems,and on the other provide heuristics for how to design artificial ones, in particular robots. The argument is based largely on the notions of time scales, complex dynamical systems, self-organization, and emergence.

The theoretical ideas will be illustrated with many examples and case studies from academia and the private sector, and there will be hands-on exercises with computer simulations and real robots (depending on the respective university's participation mode).

Zurich students (UZH and ETH): The lecture takes place in the UZH room BIN 0.K.02 at Binzmühlestrasse.