Stanford Seminar - What Brains Forgot, Bodies Remember: Building Intelligence from the Ground Up
May 16, 2025Boyuan Chen, Duke
Intelligence does not emerge fully formed, but it forms from a developmental cycle. From the earliest stages of life, animals acquire intelligence through cycles of sensing, adapting, and connecting, with their bodies, their environments, and each other. This embodied developmental process is not just a feature of natural intelligence; it offers a powerful blueprint for designing machines that are more adaptive, generalizable, and capable of meaningful interaction in the real world. In this talk, I will present a developmental arc of embodied intelligence centered on three interdependent capacities: Sense, Adapt, and Connect. I will begin with interactive perception systems that uses sound, vibrations, touch, vision, and smell to construct a comprehensive understanding of the environment. I will then move to adaptation, arguing that robust generalization in robots require modeling the “self”, both behaviorally and physically. Such understandings of the self will enable robots to reflect on its behavior, understand its morphology, and adjust in response to change. Finally, I will briefly discuss how connection extends intelligence into the social domain, where machines must synchronize, communicate, and collaborate with others in a shared world. Together, these ideas represent a unified vision: to build machines that grow, rather than are assembled — machines that do not just function, but evolve, recover, and relate. I will close by discussing how this developmental perspective may inform the future of intelligent machines.
About the speaker:
http://boyuanchen.com/
More about the course can be found here: https://stanfordasl.github.io/robotics_seminar/
View the entire AA289 Stanford Robotics and Autonomous Systems Seminar playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMeercb-kvGLUrOq4HR6BZD
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