What Brains Forgot, Bodies Remember: Building Intelligence from the Ground Up
Date: May 16, 2025 @ 3:00-4:00PM | Location: Gates B03 | Speaker: Prof. Boyuan Chen | Affiliation: Duke University
The seminar is open to Stanford faculty, students, and sponsors.
Abstract:
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.
Bio:
Dr. Boyuan Chen is the Dickinson Family Assistant Professor at Duke University, where he directs the General Robotics Lab. He is affiliated with the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Computer Science. He also serves as the Strategic Advisor for Robotics and Autonomy in the Dean’s Office at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. Dr. Chen received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia University in 2022. His research interests span across robotics, perception, machine learning, human-AI teaming, AI for science, and dynamical systems. By developing autonomous machines that sense, adapt, and connect, his lab takes a full-stack approach, spanning both the “body” and “brain” of intelligent systems, to advance embodied intelligence. Inspired by natural intelligence in humans and animals, his work explores new frontiers in adaptive, multimodal, and interactive autonomy. His work has received numerous media reports and has been featured in outlets such as the New York Times, Forbes, Fox, Fortune, Science, and the National Science Foundation.
Please visit https://stanfordasl.github.io/robotics_seminar/ for this quarter’s lineup of speakers. Although we encourage live in-person attendance, recordings of talks will be posted also.
Covid-19 related instructions: We recommend wearing a well-fitted, high-quality face covering inside the classroom.