Title: Robotics as the Path to Artificial Intelligence
Abstract: The historical promise of robotics is to produce technological artifacts with human-like abilities. This includes physical abilities, such as locomotion and dexterity, but also intellectual abilities, including reasoning and learning, and even social skills for collaboration and training. These abilities, taken together, constitute what we refer to as intelligence. I will discuss the role of robotics in understanding and replicating these abilities. Building on recent scientific progress, e.g. soft robotics and deep learning, I will sketch a path – fundamentally enabled by robotics – toward an understanding of intelligence, which will enable a future generation of machines with human-like abilities.
Bio: Oliver Brock is the Alexander-von-Humboldt Professor of Robotics at the Technische Universität Berlin. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2000. He held post-doctoral positions at Rice University and Stanford University. Starting in 2002, he was an Assistant and then Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, before to moving back to the Technische Universität Berlin in 2009. His research focuses on manipulation, perception, soft robotics, interactive machine learning, deep learning, and motion generation. He is an IEEE Fellow and president of the Robotics: Science and Systems foundation.
