University of Zurich
The Universität Zürich, or University of Zurich, is Switzerland’s largest university with a student population of about 25,000. This public university was founded in 1833 when the college of theology, law and medicine merged together with the new faculty of Philosophy.
The university was the first in Europe that was founded by the state, where most universities then were either founded by the church or the monarch. In 1847, women were allowed to attend philosophy lectures in the university, and eventually accepted the first female doctoral student in 1866.
In 1901, the university added the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine which is the world’s oldest faculty. Karl Moser designed the new campus at Rämistrasse 71 where it eventually moved.
The University of Zurich has the best performing faculties in terms of research in Europe. The faculty of Economics, Faculty of Medicine, and the Faculty of Science ranked among the best in Europe. And as a whole, the university belongs to the top ten in Europe and in the top fifty globally.
To meet demand for the emerging field of robotics, the University of Zurich established its Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at its Department of Informatics. The goal of this lab is to cultivate intelligence in all its aspects by endorsing excellence in basic research, education and society in general. Through this, the school hopes to contribute in making the world a better place to live in the 21st century and beyond.
And to prove their point, the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the University of Zurich has recently unveiled their brand new humanoid robot called the Roboy. Roboy is set to make his debut appearance at the Robots on Tour event next year (2013). Another project that the university have embarked is the ECCCEROBOT robot which is short for Embodied Cognition in a Compliantly Engineered Robot. And at the rate that the university is going, it won’t be long until they can achieve what they have envisioned for the coming century.
