14th February | 09:00-11:00 Hrs | EEE Audi
Dr Josh Bongard's resilient machine project has been recognised by Esquire magazine as one of the “Six Ideas That Will Change The World" and he is named in the annual list of “Young Innovators" by Technology Review magazine. A pioneer in the field of robotics, Dr Josh Bongard is well known for his work on evolutionary robotics using the concept of continuous self modeling which has eventually opened up new challenging areas of research. He has also implemented a system called, Artificial Otogeny that ‘grows a virtual egg into a fully formed virtual robot.’
Harbouring a creative and inquisitive mind, Dr Josh Bongard seeks to create an automatic robot design with little or no human intervention. Using the concept of evolutionary computation, he can throw light on the design of virtual robots which can exploit the physical dynamics of their environment to generate behavior. Moreover, he has developed a simulation system called, Artificial Ontogeny, which combines artificial evolution with artificial development which has the potential to contribute to embodied cognitive science by providing examples of the evolution of intelligence in a virtual environment.
Dr Josh Bongard is an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science in University of Vermont. He has published the book, How the body shapes the way we think: A new view of intelligence, together with Rolf Pfeifer which demonstrates that thought is not independent of the body but is tightly constrained, and at the same time enabled, by it. He shows that the kinds of thoughts we are capable of have their foundation in our embodiment — in our morphology and the material properties of our bodies.
Pragyan '09 presents a VC with Dr. Josh Bongard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josh_BongardResilient machines
Intelligent robots must be able to not only adapt an existing behavior on the fly in the face of environmental perturbation, but must also be able to generate new, compensating behavior after severe, unanticipated change such as body damage. In this talk I will describe a physical robot with this latter capability, a capability we refer to as resiliency. The robot achieves this by (1) creating an approximate simulation of itself; (2) optimizing a controller using this simulator; (3) using the controller in reality; (4) experiencing body damage; (5) indirectly inferring the damage and updating the simulator; (6) re-optimizing a new controller in the altered simulator; and (6) executing this compensatory controller in reality. I will also describe recent work generalizing this approach to robot teams. Time permitting I will discuss my work involving artificial ontogeny, in which artificial evolution and artificial development are combined to grow adaptive robots in virtual environments.
Bio
Josh Bongard received his Bachelors degree in Computer Science from McMaster University, Canada, his Masters degree from the University of Sussex, UK, and his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He served as a postdoctoral associate under Hod Lipson in the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University from 2003 to 2006. He is the co-author of the popular science book entitled "How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence," MIT Press, November 2006 (with Rolf Pfeifer). Currently, he is an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Vermont. His research interests include embodied cognition and evolutionary computation, and he was named both a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow in 2006, as well as a member of the TR35: MIT Technology Review's top 35 innovators under the age of 35.
