Tarin Ziyaee, Michael Levin and Joshua Bongard | Embodied Natural Intelligence vs Embodied Artificial Intelligence
Foresight Institute’s Neurotech Group
Embodied Natural Intelligence VS Embodied Artificial Intelligence: What's the difference, and what are we missing?
Abstract: The author Jacob Bronowski famously expressed, “the hand is the cutting edge of the mind”. Natural systems (including humans, advanced mammals, and even avian species), have a core ability of treating tools as extensions of the body - a trait highlighting an evolutionary advantage of generalizing motor skills. Natural systems can even operate devices that have no ethological precedent - (eg, a monkey driving a car) - indicating a general-purpose learning machinery for embodied control. Yet in the internet scale age of data, modern robotics remains surprisingly brittle in comparison to the above. In this talk, we ask what exactly embodied intelligence is, and unpack the reasons behind the persistently large gap in capability and reliability between natural and artificial systems in the realm of physical interaction.
Speakers Bio:
Tarin Ziyaee is the CEO of Second-Nature AI, and has over 20 years of unique experience in natural control systems and autonomous robotics systems. He believes the time is right to close the gap between natural and artificial physical intelligence. Previously, Tarin led Apple’s Autonomous Vehicles (AV) early perception team, and worked on Autonomous Vehicles as CTO of Voyage (acquired by Cruise), Autonomous Land-Vehicles for US Army Research Lab, and Autonomous Underwater systems for the Naval Underwater Warfare Center (NUWC). Tarin was also Director R&D at CTRL-Labs (acquired by Meta, $1B+) developing AI systems to reverse engineer sensorimotor control from biological systems' neural data. As CEO of Neurosys, he reverse engineered sensorimotor control loops of live Macaques monkeys’ neural data working w/ the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and developed neural decoding algorithms for in-vivo brain-machine interfaces (BMI)s of Macaques monkeys controlling items in chaotic environments. At Meta Reality Research Labs, Tarin’s team led generative AI efforts to reconstruct sensorimotor control systems from biological data towards decoding robust control.
Dr. Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University and Director of the Allen Discovery Center. His group explores how cells communicate and cooperate to create complex anatomical structures, focusing on the role of bioelectricity as the cognitive glue that underlies collective intelligence of cells in development, regeneration, and cancer. Dr. Levin’s work bridges biology, computation, and engineering, including the creation of Xenobots and Anthrobots—entirely new classes of living biobots with many useful applications. The Levin lab seeks insights into the diverse intelligence inherent in living material at all scales, and uses them to develop new regenerative medicine approaches as well as novel approaches to artificial and hybrid AI agents.
Josh Bongard is the Veinott Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont and director of the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory. His work involves automated design and manufacture of soft-, evolved-, crowdsourced-, and biological robots (so-called “xenobots”). APECASE, TR35, and Cozzarelli Prize recipient, he has received funding from NSF, NASA, DARPA, ARO and the Sloan Foundation. He is the co-author of the book How The Body Shapes the Way We Think, the instructor of a reddit-based evolutionary robotics MOOC, and director of the robotics outreach program Twitch Plays Robotics.
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