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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20250509T141500
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20250509T154500
DTSTAMP:20260424T040815
CREATED:20250317T111247Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250603T123955Z
UID:23742-1746800100-1746805500@www.scienceofintelligence.de
SUMMARY:J. Kevin O’Regan (CNRS Paris)\, “How To Make a Machine That Is Conscious and Really Feels”
DESCRIPTION:Despite current advances in artificial intelligence\, many people remain convinced that machines are still far from being able to really experience\, for example\, the redness of a sunset\, the pain of a pinprick\, or what it’s like to be sad. This “phenomenal” or “felt” aspect of consciousness seems outside the realm of science and impossible to implement in machines. Philosophers say phenomenal consciousness is the “hard problem”. I will show that the “hard problem” dissolves if we think about experiences using a “sensorimotor” approach.  Like the abandonment of the “ether hypothesis” and the “vital spirit” at the beginning of the 20th century\, the sensorimotor approach requires making a metaphysical shift. Instead of thinking of experiences as “happening to us”\, we should think of experiences as “things we do”.  I will illustrate the idea by taking concrete examples from the study of vision and touch. With this approach it becomes potentially possible to explain everything that can be explained from a scientific point of view about what it’s like to have sensory\, bodily\, emotional and mental experiences. Phenomenal consciousness loses its mystery. There is no obstacle to making machines that really feel. They are coming very soon. \n  \nBio \nKevin O’Regan is emeritus ex-director of the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception\, CNRS\, Université Paris Descartes. After working on eye movements in reading he became interested in visual stability and discovered the phenomenon of change blindness. His current work concerns the sensorimotor approach to phenomenal consciousness and its applications to child development and robotics. See http://whatfeelingislike.net and http://kevin-oregan.net/. \n  \nFor those who are not in Berlin but would like to join virtually:\nhttps://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/69207754612?pwd=IKxoTdY3dQWccHpce2nA0IsNkNxPHu.1 \n  \nThis talk is also part of Aravind Battaje‘s course “Mind\, Body\, Environment: An Interactive Seminar on Embodied Intelligence\,” a seminar introducing to key theories and research highlighting this shift in perspective through invited lectures from experts in the field and interactive sessions. \n  \nPhoto kindly provided by the speaker.
URL:https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/event/kevin-oregan-cnrs-paris/
LOCATION:SCIoI\, Marchstraße 23\, 10587 Berlin\, Room 2.057
CATEGORIES:Distinguished Speaker Series
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20250620T141500
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20250620T154500
DTSTAMP:20260424T040815
CREATED:20250317T111505Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250616T132501Z
UID:23745-1750428900-1750434300@www.scienceofintelligence.de
SUMMARY:John Tsotsos (York University)\, "Attentional Mechanisms Bridge Seeing to Looking"
DESCRIPTION:David Marr wrote ‘What does it mean\, to see? The plain man’s answer (and Aristotle’s\, too) would be\, to know what is where by looking‘. Modern vision science has moved beyond Aristotle’s view as well as Marr’s\, although it certainly would not have advanced without the influence of both. Seeing and Looking are different and although related in a plain  manner\, at a deeper mechanistic level it is not plain at all: they are spatially\, temporally and causally connected.  \nWe examine Looking and Seeing and the roles they play in a rational visual agent that functions purposefully in a real three-dimensional world\, as a plain person\, Marr\, or Aristotle would behave during their lifetimes. The vast bulk of theoretical\, experimental and empirical research has focussed on how an agent views and perceives an image\, singly or in video sequence. We add to the small but growing literature that addresses how an agent chooses how to view a three-dimensional world in the context of a real world task. Looking is the result of a change of gaze while Seeing is what occurs during the analysis of what is being looked at and causes a particular next Looking act. Gaze change ranges over a full 6 degrees-of-freedom for head pose and 3 degrees-of-freedom for each of  two eyes within that head.  \nAlthough our past research has shown that sensor viewpoint planning has provably exponential complexity properties\, we propose that an array of attentional mechanisms\, as found in our Selective Tuning model\, tame the complexity of such behaviour and provides the bridge between Seeing and Looking. Through extensive human experiment (one of these is the pictured Same-Different Task) and foraging through the history of computational vision\, we are gradually constructing a picture of a complex blend of orchestrated attentional\, visual\, reasoning\, planning and motor behaviours required for real-world 3D visual tasks.  \nBio \nJohn Tsotsos (he/him) is Distinguished Research Professor of Vision Science at York University and also holds an Adjunct Professorship in Ophthalmology and Vision Sciences at the University of Toronto. Internationally recognized for his pioneering work on visual attention and active vision\, Prof. Tsotsos developed the influential Selective Tuning theory\, which has shaped understanding of both human and computational vision. His research spans computer vision\, computational neuroscience\, robotics\, and artificial intelligence\, with over 300 refereed publications and major contributions to areas such as motion interpretation\, visual search\, and medical image analysis. \nProf. Tsotsos has received numerous honors\, including Fellowships in the Royal Society of Canada\, IEEE\, and the Canadian Academy of Engineering\, as well as the Sir John William Dawson Medal for sustained excellence in interdisciplinary research—the first computer scientist to receive this distinction. He has held the NSERC Tier I Canada Research Chair in Computational Vision since 2003 and was the founding Director of York’s Centre for Vision Research\, which he led to international prominence. \n  \nFor those who are not in Berlin but would like to join virtually:\nhttps://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/69207754612?pwd=IKxoTdY3dQWccHpce2nA0IsNkNxPHu.1 \nThis talk is part of Aravind Battaje‘s course “Mind\, Body\, Environment: An Interactive Seminar on Embodied Intelligence\,” a seminar introducing to key theories and research highlighting this shift in perspective through invited lectures from experts in the field and interactive sessions. \nPhoto provided by the speaker.
URL:https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/event/john-tsotsos-york-university/
LOCATION:SCIoI\, Marchstraße 23\, 10587 Berlin\, Room 2.057
CATEGORIES:Distinguished Speaker Series
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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20250627T140000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/Berlin:20250627T160000
DTSTAMP:20260424T040815
CREATED:20250402T102518Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20250625T112746Z
UID:24016-1751032800-1751040000@www.scienceofintelligence.de
SUMMARY:Dario Floreano (EPFL)\, "Avian-Inspired Drones"
DESCRIPTION:In less than 20 years drones transitioned from research labs to the real world and had a major impact on inspection\, security\, rescue\, logistics\, and entertainment. However\, today’s drones do not match the agility\, endurance\, adaptability\, and intelligence of birds. Birds are not only the masters of the sky but are also at ease on the ground and in water. Stringent aerodynamical constraints shaped their bodies and brains to leverage morphological change to adapt to diverse locomotion conditions that are still poorly understood. I will show examples of abstracting principles of avian morphological design and flight control to design agile aerial robots that can also be used to test biological hypotheses and improve our understanding of embodied intelligence in avian vertebrates. \nBio \nProf. Dario Floreano is director of the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL). Between 2010 and 2022\, he was the founding director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Robotics\, a research program that graduated almost 200 PhD students and more than 100 postdocs\, funded two professorships at EPFL and University of Zurich\, created the EPFL Master’s program in Robotics and the annual Swiss Robotics Day\,  helped launch Cybathlon\, and generated more than 15 robotics  spinoffs that created several hundred jobs. \nProf. Floreano holds an M.A. in Vision\, an M.S. in Neural Computation\, and a PhD in Robotics. He has held research positions at Sony Computer Science Laboratory\, at Caltech/JPL\, and at Harvard University. His research interests are Robotics and A.I. at the convergence of biology and engineering. Prof. Floreano made pioneering contributions to the fields of evolutionary robotics\, aerial robotics\, and soft robotics. He served in numerous advisory boards and committees\, including the Future and Emerging Technologies division of the European Commission\, the World Economic Forum Agenda Council\, the International Society of Artificial Life\, the International Neural Network Society\, and in the editorial committee of several scientific journals. In addition\, he helped spinning off three drone companies (senseFly.com\, Flyability.com\, Elythor.com) and a non-for-profit portal on robotics and A.I. (RoboHub.org). For more information\, visit his EPFL profile or Google Scholar page. \n  \nFor those who are not in Berlin but would like to join virtually:\nhttps://tu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/69207754612?pwd=IKxoTdY3dQWccHpce2nA0IsNkNxPHu.1 \nThis talk is part of Aravind Battaje‘s course “Mind\, Body\, Environment: An Interactive Seminar on Embodied Intelligence\,” a seminar introducing to key theories and research highlighting this shift in perspective through invited lectures from experts in the field and interactive sessions. \nPhoto created with DALL-E by Maria Ott. \n 
URL:https://www.scienceofintelligence.de/event/dario-floreano-epfl/
LOCATION:SCIoI\, Marchstraße 23\, 10587 Berlin\, Room 2.057
CATEGORIES:Distinguished Speaker Series
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