Is information digital? A defense of reality

Digital, data-driven processes - such as large language models - have made astonishing progress in recent years. However, the development of cyber-physical systems such as robots has been much slower. Is this just due to a lack of training data? Prof. Edward A. Lee from the University of California at Berkeley proposes a fundamental explanation in his lecture.

Under the title "Is Information Digital? A Defense of Reality", he explores the question of whether there is a fundamental difference between acquiring knowledge through observation and acquiring knowledge through embodied interaction. Can you learn to ride a bike by watching others? Using concepts from computer science - such as zero-knowledge proofs or bisimulation - Lee shows that certain forms of learning are only possible through physical experience. With the help of Shannon's information theory, he also argues that objective observation can never capture the entire physical reality: There is information in the real world that cannot be represented digitally.

Edward A. Lee is Professor of the Graduate School and Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught and conducted research since 1986. He is co-founder of Xronos Inc. and BDTI Inc. and author of seven books and hundreds of scientific papers and reports. His research focuses on cyber-physical systems that combine physical dynamics with software and networks. As director of the iCyPhy research center, he leads projects on modeling deterministic systems and was previously chair of the EECS Department at UC Berkeley.

Event details:
Date: Thursday, March 5, 2026
Time: 13:00 - 15:00
Location: Lecture Hall E23, Otto-Hahn-Straße 14 (OH14), Department of Computer Science

The event is organized together with the Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security and the Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence.