Rolf Pfeifer (born 1947) is professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics, University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has a Ph.D. in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and at Yale University in the U.S.
Having worked as a visiting professor and research fellow at Free University of Brussels, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, he was elected "21st Century COE Professor, Information Science and Technology" at the University of Tokyo for 2003/2004, from where he held the first global, fully interactive, videoconferencing-based lecture series "The AI Lectures from Tokyo" (including Tokyo, Beijing, Jeddah, Warsaw, Munich, and Zurich). This lectures were renamed to the ShanghAI Lectures and since 2009 they are broadcasted all over the world.
He is the author of the books Understanding Intelligence (co-author: C. Scheier), How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence MIT Press, 2006 (with Josh Bongard), and "Designing Intelligence" (with Josh Bongard and Don Berry). He has published over 100 scientific articles.
His research interests include Embodied Cognitive Science, Biorobotics, Autonomous agents/mobile robots, Artificial Life, Morphology/morpho-functional machines, Situated Design, Emotion.