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About this event

The annual Tustin Lecture is held in honour of Professor Arnold Tustin (1899-1994). Best known for the bilinear transformations that bear his name, Tustin is also known for his contributions to control theory and its application to electrical machines. He also made significant contributions to mainstream electrical engineering and was the author of many published papers on electrical machines. 

His interests went beyond engineering, for he was a polymath who brought a systems approach to each of the many areas that he touched. In the modern jargon he thought ‘outside the box’ and in doing so championed the use of control systems theory beyond its traditional limits, applying a systems approach to such areas as economics and biology. It is the use of a systems approach and his interest in biology that connects him to the theme of this lecture.

Researching the great complexities of living systems depends expansively upon the tools of control, feedback theory and dynamical systems analysis. Hear about the exciting new developments in this research from Prof. Dr. Körner, president of the Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH

Learning to behave

Our brains are designed to achieve autonomous adaptation to a changing world. At the Honda Research Institute Europe, they are working on understanding essential principles of how the brain organizes behaviour to create some aspects of brain-like intelligence.

Step by step they implemented nested control loops for reflexes, attention modulated behaviour, on-line learning of objects from sensory experience, and generating predictions for interaction into their humanoid ASIMO. This enabled it to learn to recognize objects through the interaction with humans, to learn associations between acoustic and visual objects, as well as to associate sound with behavioural concepts for interaction, and to demonstrate first steps of prediction driven behaviour.

Researching the great complexities of living systems depends expansively upon the tools of control, feedback theory and dynamical systems analysis. Hear about the exciting new developments in this research from Prof. Dr. Körner, president of the Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH.