Prof. Dr. Edgar Körner

Edgar Körner studied electrical engineering, and biomedical cybernetics at the Ilmenau Institute of Technology, Germany. From 1976 to 1984 he served as an assistant professor/senior staff researcher and established the bionics research laboratory at the same university. The research activities included experimental work in neurophysiology and neural systems modeling as well as in psychophysics and medical expert systems. He received his Dr.-Ing. in the field of biomedical cybernetics in 1977 and the Dr. sci. techn. (habilitation) in biocybernetics in 1984, both from Ilmenau Institute of Technology. From 1984 to 1987, he joined the Bioholonics Project of JRDC (Tokyo) as a research fellow dealing with brain-like vision systems. Back at the Ilmenau Institute of Technology, he continued research in biological vision and neurofuzzy control systems as an associate professor.
In 1988, Dr. Körner was appointed full professor for biocybernetics and head of the Department of Neurocomputing and Cognitive Systems. In 1992 he moved to Japan to join Honda R&D’s Wako Research Center near Tokyo, focusing as a chief scientist on the brain-like intelligence research. In 1997 he started research in computational neuroscience, evolutionary technology, and cognitive robotics at Honda R&D Europe, where he served as an executive vice president and head of the Future Technology Research Division. Since 2003, Dr. Körner serves as the president of the Honda Research Institute Europe GmbH. Since October 2007, he additionally serves as a co-director of the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics at the University Bielefeld. His research interest covers brain-like intelligence, with a special focus on self-referential control architectures, self-organization of knowledge representation, and autonomous robots.