Curse and blessing of applying science

The talk is split into two parts. In the first part, I will present our vision of morphological computation and control. Initially, these concepts played and play some role in robotics. The basic idea is given by the observation that the physical dynamics of a system can be directly employed for control purposes. Quite well established in robotics (embodied intelligence), the concept is of broader generality. The talk presents the transfer of the idea to chemical, spatially structured systems, medical applications, and the evolution of digital circuitry.

The second part discusses our perspective on applied science. The term plays an increasing role also in funding, and there are several questions that the scientific community should address. The first one is whether the term makes any sense at all. Second, we claim that science has room for optimizing its profit from cooperating with the realm of applications. Thirdly, our group has been strongly involved in modeling non-pharmaceutical interventions in the COVID19 pandemic over the last two years. We discuss some lessons learnt concerning the role of computational modelling in scientific projects in contrast to decision making.