אירועים והרצאות בפקולטה למדעי המחשב ע"ש הנרי ומרילין טאוב

While digital AI and large multimodal models have achieved massive scaling laws in virtual spaces, grounding artificial intelligence in the unstructured, non-deterministic physical world exposes severe foundational bottlenecks. Physical AI -the synthesis of embodied robotics, multi-modal perception, foundation world models, and real-time control- cannot rely merely on scaling compute or self-supervised text scraping. The transition to embodied agents operating safely at human-level dexterity and situational reasoning presents acute open problems: closing the sim-to-real gap, formulating verifiable neural world models, scaling physics-grounded reinforcement learning under sparse supervision, and developing low-latency edge inference capable of deterministic safety guarantees.

This talk bypasses off-the-shelf industrial deployments to outline the critical scientific and algorithmic roadblocks where industry and public frameworks stall without academic intervention. We will dissect the open research questions Israel must tackle to pioneer embodied autonomy: How do we construct mathematically rigorous bounds for agent safety in unstructured physical environments? What new paradigms in spatial reasoning and tactile-proprioceptive sensor fusion can replace sample-inefficient learning?

Short bio: Guy Altagar is the Vice President and Head of Physical AI at the Israeli National AI Directorate within the Prime Minister's Office, where he leads national strategy, infrastructure development, and R&D testbed initiatives for embodied artificial intelligence and robotics. Prior to his government role, he was the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Unlimited Robotics, leading the development of autonomous service robot platforms and software operating systems for embodied devices. With an interdisciplinary background spanning deep-tech entrepreneurship, engineering leadership, and law, Guy works closely with academic research institutions, government bodies, and international industry leaders to accelerate national-scale computing infrastructure, physical test environments, and cross-disciplinary research in physical autonomy.