International Workshop on Embodied Intelligence

There has been a long-standing debate about how our mind controls our body, or how our mind is being controlled by our body. This debate turns out to be a profound scientific question still today to deepen our understanding of the nature of human, and other animals', intelligent adaptive behaviours. The research field of Embodied Intelligence put the physical entity of our body in the middle of research subject to gain further insights into intelligence, and explore how our brain and ourselves as a whole develop through physical interactions with the world. In the age of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, the research of embodied intelligence is still highly important, and delivering even more valuable input to extend the impact of the conventional AI technology in the near future.

For this reason, this project aims to organise a workshop on Embodied Intelligence to put together the world leaders of this research area, to review the state of the art, and to discuss the future research directions and collaborations. We invite not only the UK researchers in this field but also the top researchers around the world by obtaining some co-funding from other agency.
As the main outcome of this event we expect:
(1) A consensus of research agenda, and exploration of research possibilities and actions to address the gaps.
(2) Discussion and agreement on major actions to shape the future of the field, and report the outcome of this workshop as a special issue at a major technical journal
(3) Develop a scientific network of these researchers to foster further collaborations and research exchanges as a working group.
(4) Develop joint interdisciplinary and international research grant proposals (both in UK, Europe, and beyond)
(5) Promote the exchange of young researchers (Master, PhD students and postdocs) between institutions, strengthening not only their academic capabilities but also increasing their awareness of different cultures.

This workshop plans a set of effective actions for three impact areas, i.e. academic, educational, and industrial, through international collaborations. In general, while the AI technologies have considerable impact in our daily lives, the impact will be significantly extended when they are applied more to our physical world. The expected lack of labor forces as well as the needs of elderly care will be particularly the sectors where robotics technologies, such as automation of production processes and wearable, assistive and medical devices, will provide significant contributions to sustain our society in the next decades. In this context, embodied intelligence will be one of the most important conceptual backbones to understand the intelligence in the physical world, physical interactions with humans, and embodied understanding in human society.

(1) Activities toward academic collaborations: Academic outreach activities in embodied intelligence research are particularly important because of its interdisciplinary nature of the field. There is no simple way to make significant progress without interdisciplinary collaborations between engineering, biologists, physists and philosophers. To foster cross-disciplinary collaborations, (i) we write and publish a report outlining the outcome of the discussion in this workshop, (ii) we organize a special issue on the topics of soft robotics research in a major journal, and (iii) we develop a joint research grant proposals for the international and national funding schemes.
(2) Impact through education and public outreach: Another crucial outreach activity of this workshop is education of embodied intelligence research to younger engineers as well as general public. There is an urgent need of engineers in the next generations who can make use of the newly developed technologies, and it is also necessary for a broader scope of people to know more about the unconventional robotics technologies that can change our lives in the near future. From this perspective, (i) we invite senior students and postdocs to the workshop who could be the main drivers of progressing the research in this field, (ii) we organize a tutorial sessions and impact activities with journalists and artists to promote the research programs, (iii) we coordinate with the existing national and international robotics education programs such as UK-RAS Network and the other European training networks.
(3) Activities toward industrial impact: This project also explores the pathway of impact toward practical industrial applications. Compared to the conventional computational paradigm of intelligence, the embodied intelligence we explore in this project will provide distinguished unique selling points: such as efficiency, biological plausibility, handling of real-world phenomena. Therefore there should be considerable demand of the relevant technologies we discuss in this workshop, especially in the context of innovative manufacturing, robotic co-workers, and other soft robotics applications in the context of wearable, rehabilitation and medical industry. These possibilities will be explored together with the technology transfer experts during the workshop.