Biography

Dr. Matej Hoffmann was born in Prague, Czech Republic, and received his MSc degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence from Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, in 2006. Between 2006 and 2013 he completed the PhD degree and then served as Senior Research Associate at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, University of Zurich, Switzerland (Prof. Rolf Pfeifer). In 2013 he joined the iCub Facility of the Italian Institute of Technology (Prof. Giorgio Metta), supported by a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (iCub Body Schema, 2014-2016). In 2017, he joined the Department of Cybernetics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague where he is currently serving as an Assistant Professor and leading a group (see the group website) focused on cognitive, neuro-, collaborative, and humanoid robotics.

Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/matejhof/

Group website: http://cmp.felk.cvut.cz/projects/body-schema/

Abstract

Development of reaching to the body in early infancy: From experiments to robotic models

In this talk I will briefly review a series of experiments tapping into infants’ development of “functional body knowledge” by observing reponses to vibrotactile stimulations on different body parts (in collaboration with Jeffrey Lockman, Kevin O’Regan et al. – see Hoffmann et al., ICDL 2017). One possible mechanism to explain the observations might rely on the brain extracting “sensorimotor contingencies” linking motor actions and resulting sensory consequences. A second possible account appeals to the neuroscientific concepts of cortical maps and coordinate transformations. I will present embodied computational models on a humanoid robot with artificial skin where we implemented learning the “somatosensory homunculi”, reaching for tactile stimuli, and exploration of own body driven by intrinsic motivation.