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Fumiya Iida: Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Building brain & body together in bio-inspired robots

Embodied Artificial Intelligence: Building brain and body together in bio-inspired robots

Theme: Brains and Machines

Abstract: Our brains grow together with our mechanical bodies, and the developmental process of embodiment plays significant roles in shaping the structures of neuronal circuits and information processing. In this talk, I will be introducing some of our attempts to apply an engineering approach to the development of artificial brains for bio-inspired robots of various kinds (e.g. walking, hopping, crawling, swimming, and dancing robots), and discuss how this synthetic methodology could lead to our further understanding of embodied intelligence.

Short biography: Fumiya Iida is a Professor of Robotics at Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, the director of Bio-Inspired Robotics, and the director of Cambridge Observatory for Human Machine Collaboration. He received his bachelor and master degrees in mechanical engineering at Tokyo University of Science (Japan, 1999), and Dr. sc. nat. in Informatics at University of Zurich (2006). In 2004 and 2005, he was also engaged in biomechanics research of human locomotion at Locomotion Laboratory, University of Jena (Germany). From 2006 to 2009, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in USA . In 2006, he awarded the Fellowship for Prospective Researchers from the Swiss National Science Foundation, and in 2009, the Swiss National Science Foundation Professorship for an assistant professorship at ETH Zurich from 2009 to 2015. He was a recipient of the IROS2016 Fukuda Young Professional Award, Royal Society Translation Award in 2017, Tokyo University of Science Award in 2021. His research interest includes biologically inspired robotics, embodied artificial intelligence, and biomechanics, where he was involved in a number of research projects related to dynamic legged locomotion, dextrous and adaptive manipulation, human-machine interactions, and evolutionary robotics.

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