Background
Pfeifer, Rolf was born on February 24, 1947 in Zürich, Switzerland. Son of Werner and Heidy (Gnehm) Pfeifer.
Pfeifer, Rolf was born on February 24, 1947 in Zürich, Switzerland. Son of Werner and Heidy (Gnehm) Pfeifer.
He has a master"s degree in physics and mathematics and a Doctor of Philosophy in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule ) in Zurich, Switzerland.
Currently he is a specially appointed professor at Osaka University, and a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and at Yale University in the United States.
Having worked as a visiting professor and research fellow at Free University of Brussels, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Neurosciences Institute (National Standard Instructor) in San Diego, and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, he was elected "21st Century Council of Europe Professor, Information Science and Technology" at the University of Tokyo for 2003/2004, from where he held the first global, fully interactive, videoconferencing-based lecture series "The Artificial Intelligence Lectures from Tokyo" (including Tokyo, Beijing, Jeddah, Warsaw, Munich, and Zurich). This lectures were renamed the ShanghAI Lectures and since 2009 they have been broadcast all over the world.
He is the author of the books Understanding Intelligence (co-author: C Scheier), How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2006 (with Josh Bongard), and "Designing Intelligence" (with Josh Bongard and Don Berry).
He has published over 100 scientific articles His research interests include Embodied cognition, Biorobotics, Autonomous agents/mobile robots, Artificial life, Morphology/morpho-functional machines, Situated Design, Emotion.
Married Beatrice Schaub, February 23, 1980. Children: Serge Manuel, Mischa Dimitri.