Course Setup

The course will kick off with a meeting where all participants will introduce their research in short 15 minutes presentations. The aim of this meeting is to get to know each other and the research at the different groups.

There will be weekly meetings of two hours throughout the semester. Six of these meetings will be with invited speakers (three internal, three external). During the rest of the meetings, the participants of the course will give lectures. Additionally, a multi-disciplinary research proposal will be written.

The invited speaker will give a 1 hour presentation of their work, followed by a 45 minutes question and answering and discussion. We will discuss a number of papers of the invited speaker the week before. The participants should prepare a number of questions for the invited speaker.

During the lectures, we will discuss the book "How the body shapes the way we think" by Pfeifer and Bongard. We aim to have groups of two students preparing the lectures, with students from different research backgrounds per group. Each lecture will be centered around a chapter of the book. The chapter will be discussed, as well as some related papers from the specific research areas. These papers will be selected by the students.

As an assignment, the students will write a multi-disciplinary research proposal in groups of two. The proposal needs to deal with embodied cognition and it shoudl combine the research fields of both students. The purpose of this assignment is to place research in a broader perspective, to think about multi-disciplinary collaborations, and to exercise writing a research proposal.