Ken Goldberg

On May 31 the Digital October Center released a new lecture cycle on near future technologies called Forecast for Tomorrow, created with the support of IBS, the program’s partner, as part of Knowledge Stream’s educational project.

The cycle was opened by a web conference with Ken Goldberg, recognized specialist in the problems of robotics and remote presence and author of The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet. He is also a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information.

Ken discused what can be achieved by partially replacing robots’ on-board computers with access to distributed computer networks, saving expert systems to the cloud and maintaining mass amounts of useful information and the collective experience of all connected smart machines.

Cloud robotics, of which Goldberg is a proponent, is a fresh approach built on the idea that cloud infrastructure offers robots access to an unlimited calculating facility and allows them to continuously learn to interact with previously unknown objects and entities by downloading the necessary behavioral programs—just like in the Matrix.

Free event participation was provided by general partner of the Knowledge Stream project – Rostelecom, and RVC, intellectual partner of the lecture.