Seminar on Soft and Biohybrid Robots with Embodied Intelligence

22 Sep 2026 02.30 PM - 04.00 PM LHN-TR+05 (The Arc, LHN-B2-05) Current Students, Public

A/P Kohei Nakajima

University of Tokyo, Japan

This seminar will be chaired by Prof Yeong Wai Yee.

Seminar Abstract

In this talk, I will introduce physical reservoir computing (PRC) as a framework for harnessing the intrinsic dynamics of physical systems for information processing. I will discuss how diverse physical substrates—including soft robots, neuromorphic devices, and living systems—can serve as computational resources, and how their embodied dynamics can be exploited for sensing, computation, and control. Drawing on examples of soft and biohybrid robots, I will explore how the close integration of body, environment, and computation can give rise to adaptive behavior and embodied intelligence. Through these examples, I will argue that embedding computation in physical systems is not merely a strategy for developing energy-efficient, task-specific computing technologies. It also offers a new perspective on intelligence and learning in systems whose physical dynamics are inherently time-varying, adaptive, and ultimately mortal.

Speaker's Biography 
Kohei Nakajima is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. He received his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Tokyo in 2004, 2006, and 2009, respectively. After completing his Ph.D., he spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich and ETH Zurich in Switzerland, including as a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow for Research Abroad. From 2014 to 2017, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research at Kyoto University. He is the co-editor of Reservoir Computing: Theory, Physical Implementations, and Applications (with Ingo Fischer) and The Science of Soft Robots: Design, Materials and Information Processing (with Koichi Suzumori, Kenjiro Fukuda, and Ryuma Niiyama). His research interests include nonlinear dynamical systems, information theory, reservoir computing, physical reservoir computing, and soft robotics.

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