WASP Lighthouse at Lund Seminar - Edward A. Lee, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UC Berkeley

Can a robot learn to ride a bike just by watching? Join us as Edward A. Lee (UC Berkeley) explores what the physical world knows that digital data never will. All are welcome, no background needed. 

Coffee and fika will be served after the seminar. 
Please sign up here https://survey.mailing.lu.se/Survey/65629 before July 3rd.

This is a WASP Lighthouse @ Lund Seminar
https://lund-wasp-lighthouse.blogg.lu.se/welcome-to-wasp-lighthouse-at-lund/events-and-activities/is-information-digital-a-defense-of-reality/ 

Title: Is Information Digital? A Defense of Reality

Abstract: Data-driven techniques, such as large-language models, have proven astonishingly powerful in recent years, but progress has been much slower with cyber-physical systems such as robots. Many people assume this is because there is not enough training data. In this talk, I explore a possible explanation that is much more fundamental. Specifically, I ask the question of whether there is a fundamental difference between acquisition of knowledge through observation and acquisition of knowledge through embodied interaction. Can you learn to ride a bicycle by watching others ride a bicycle? In previous work, I have used concepts from computer science (zero-knowledge proofs, bisimulation, etc.) to show that there are things you can learn from embodied interaction that cannot be learned by objective observation. In this talk, I use Shannon information theory to argue that objective observation falls far short of revealing everything about physical reality. There is information in the real world that cannot be represented digitally, and objective observation can never acquire more than a small subset of this information. In short, learning to ride a bicycle may require getting on a bicycle, even for a robot.

Bio: Edward A. Lee has been working on embedded software systems for more than 45 years. After studying and working at Yale, MIT, and Bell Labs, he landed at Berkeley, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus and Professor of the Graduate School in EECS. He is co-founder of Xronos Inc. and  BDTI, Inc. He leads the open-source software projects Lingua Franca and Ptolemy and is an author of books on embedded systems, signals and systems, digital communication, and philosophical and social implications of technology. His current research is focused on software for distributed cyber-physical systems and on what we can learn about humans from advances in AI.  More details can be found at https://eecs.berkeley.edu/~eal.