Invited Talk Title: Soft Body Meets Chaos
Abstract: Animals are ubiquitously covered with soft body, and they have a nervous system that receives sensory information from the environment in real time. Here, a nervous system often exhibits complex nonlinear dynamics, which is considered to be a chaotic one. In this talk, we present a case study that suggests the soft body dynamics may have an effect to enhance a learning capability in chaotic brain. The current findings may help in understanding the functional aspects of the combination of soft body and chaotic nervous systems, which are ubiquitous in nature.
Bio: Kohei Nakajima is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo. He received BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the University of Tokyo in 2004, 2006, and 2009, respectively. After obtaining his PhD, he spent five years as a post-doctoral fellow and a JSPS Postdoctoral Fellow for Research Abroad at the University of Zurich and at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. In 2013, he was awarded the title of the Hakubi researcher at Kyoto University, and until 2017, he was an Assistant Professor at the Hakubi Center for Advanced Research at Kyoto University. He was also a JST PRESTO researcher from 2015 to 2019. His research interests include nonlinear dynamical systems, information theory, reservoir computing, physical reservoir computing, and soft robotics.