CURRICULUM VITAE

Research Area

Embodied intelligence, self-assembly and self-replair, bio-inspired robotics, educational technology

Focus Area

dynamical locomotion, underactuated systems, role of material and morphology in intelligent behavior, design for emergence

Short Bio

M.Sc. in physics and math. and Ph.D. in computer science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zürich. Three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie-Mellon and Yale University. Since 1987, prof. of computer science at the Dept. of Informatics, University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AILab). Visiting prof. at the Free Univ. of Brussels, the MIT ALab, the Beijing Open Laboratory for Cognitive Science, the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, and the Sony Comp. Science Lab. in Paris. 2003/2004: "21st Century COE Prof. Information Science and Technology" at the Univ. of Tokyo; the first global, fully interactive, videoconferencing-based lecture series "The AI Lectures from Tokyo" (with Tokyo, Beijing, Jiddah, Munich, Warsaw, and Zurich). Books: "Understanding Intelligence", 1999, MIT Press, and "How the body shapes the way we think: a new view of intelligence," 2007, MIT Press (with Josh Bongard). Recent publication: Pfeifer, R., Lungarella, M., and Iida, F., "Self-organization, Embodiment, and Biologically Inspired Robotics", Science, 318, 1088-1093 (2007). New Project: “The ShanghAI Lectures”, an expeirment in mixed-reality global teaching, intercultural collaboration and community building, fall term 2009.