Prof. Rolf Pfeifer
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Institute of Informatics
University of Zurich

Rolf Pfeifer received his master’s degree in physics and mathematics and his Ph.D. in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie-Mellon University and at Yale University in the US. Since 1987 he has been a professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Having worked as a visiting professor and research fellow at the Free University of Brussels, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in Cambridge, Mass., the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, the Beijing Open Laboratory for Cognitive Science, and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, he was elected "21st Century COE Professor, Information Science and Technology" at the University of Tokyo. In 2009 he was also a visiting professor at the Suola Superiore Sant'Anna in Pisa, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, and he was appointed "Fellow of the School of Engineering" at the University of Tokyo. His research interests are in the areas of embodiment, biorobotics, artificial evolution and morphogenesis, modular robotics, self-assembly and educational technology. He is the author of the book "Understanding Intelligence", MIT Press, 1999 (with C. Scheier) and "How the body shapes the way we think: a new view of intelligence," 2007 (with Josh Bongard) MIT Press (popular science style). Next project: “The ShanghAI Lectures 1.1 (building on Shanghai 1.0 in 2009)”, a global mixed-reality lecture series on embodied intelligence, broadcast this time from the University of Zurich in Switzerland in cooperation with universities from around the globe (fall term 2011, starting end of September 2011).

Prof. Dr. Alois Knoll
Institut für Informatik VI
Technische Universität München
Germany

Alois C. Knoll received the diploma (M.Sc.) degree in Electrical/Communications Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 1985 and his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) in computer science from the Technical University of Berlin, Germany, in 1988. He served on the faculty of the computer science department of TU Berlin until 1993, when he qualified for teaching computer science at a university (habilitation). He then joined the Technical Faculty of the University of Bielefeld, where he was a full professor and the director of the research group Technical Informatics until 2001. Between May 2001 and April 2004 he was a member of the board of directors of the Fraunhofer-Institute for Autonomous Intelligent Systems. At AIS he was head of the research group "Robotics Construction Kits", dedicated to research and development in the area of educational robotics. Since autumn 2001 he has been a professor of Computer Science at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universität München. He is also on the board of directors of the Central Institute of Medical Technology at TUM (IMETUM-Garching); between April 2004 and March 2006 he was Executive Director of the Institute of Computer Science at TUM. His research interests include cognitive, medical and sensor-based robotics, multi-agent systems, data fusion, adaptive systems and multimedia information retrieval. In these fields he has published over 200 technical papers and guest-edited international journals. He has participated (and has coordinated) several large scale national collaborative research projects (funded by the EU, the DFG, the DAAD, the state of North-Rhine-Westphalia). He initiated and was the program chairman of the First IEEE/RAS Conference on Humanoid Robots (IEEE-RAS/RSJ Humanoids2000), he was general chair of IEEE Humanoids2003 and general chair of Robotik 2004, the largest German conference on robotics, and he served on several other organising committees. Prof. Knoll is a member of the German Society for Computer Science (Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI)) and the IEEE.

Prof. Dr. Owen Holland
University of Essex
England

Owen Holland is currently a professor of cognitive robotics (Informatics)in the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex. He was until recently a professor of computer science at the University of Essex, England. Previously, he has held faculty positions at Caltech, University of Bielefeld, Starlab and the University of the West of England. Holland is best known for his work in biologically-inspired robotics, where he has contributed to the theory and practice of collective robotics, ant algorithms and machine consciousness, among other sub-fields. Some of the projects he has been involved in have attracted attention from the media, notably the Slugbot project, which aimed to produce a robotic predator capable of sustaining its energy levels from hunting and digesting snails. For the last ten years he has mainly been interested in the prospects for building a conscious machine. In 2001 he was an organiser and session chair for one of the first symposia on machine consciousness, and in 2003 he edited a special issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on the topic. In 2004 he obtained the first major funding for a machine consciousness project which investigated whether a human-like robot with a self-model and a world-model might exhibit features characteristic of consciousness. The robot, CRONOS, is now being further developed in a European project ECCEROBOT led by Owen, which will run from 2009 – 2011. Owen Holland has been an active contributor to most of the machine consciousness symposia held in the last decade, and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Machine Consciousness.

Rob Knight
Founder and Research Director
The Robot Studio
France

Rob Knight was educated at Cambridge University in Manufacturing Engineering and at the University of Essex in Embedded Systems and Robotics. Whilst at Cambridge he led teams to build robots for, and compete in, televised robot fighting competitions on both sides of the Atlantic. Later at Essex he worked on the world’s first commercially successful display of autonomous free-swimming robot fish as well as developing the initial anthropomimetic technology for the CRONOS project. In 2005, he moved to France and founded The Robot Studio which continues to develop the anthropomimetic approach with the ECCERobot series.

Hugo Gravato Marques

Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Institute of Informatics
University of Zurich

Hugo Gravato Marques completed a 5-year degree in Informatics and Computer Engineering from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto in 2003. He got his PhD from the University of Essex in 2010. At the moment he is a post-doctoral researcher at the AI Lab in the University of Zurich and at the BIRLab at the ETH where he is investigating the control of compliant tendon-driven robots. His main interests lie in the field of developmental robotics. He is particularly interested in using early human development as an inspiration to program robots that can autonomously develop increasingly complex behaviours from sensorimotor interactions.

Institut für Informatik VI
Technische Universität München
Germany

Michael Jäntsch is currently working towards his Ph.D. at the chair of Robotics and Embedded Systems at the Technische Universität München. He received his diploma degree in mechatronics from the Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg in 2008. His main research interests lie in the control of musculoskeletal robots.

Institut für Informatik VI
Technische Universität München
Germany

Steffen Wittmeier received the Diploma degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Applied Sciences Konstanz (Germany) in 2006. Since then, he has worked as a Research Assistant in the field of Computational Neuroscience at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and as an external Development Engineer and Consultant for the Volkswagen corporation. He is currently working towards the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the Chair of Robotics and Embedded Systems, Technische Universität München (Germany).  He is particularly interested in physics-based simulations and in motor control of musculoskeletal robots.

EDS (for embodied design study) is an anthropomimetic robot of the Ecce-robot type, meaning it is designed not only to look human, but to mimic the inner architecture and mechanisms of the human body like bones, ligaments, and joints. The three goals behind ECCE are (1) to design and build a robot using anthropomimetic principles, (2) to characterise its dynamics and control it, (3) to exploit its human-like characteristics to produce some human-like cognitive features.