Rolf Pfeifer (born 1947) is a former professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics University of Zurich, and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he retired from in 2014. Currently he is a specially appointed professor at Osaka University, and a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has a master's degree in physics and mathematics and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. He spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and at Yale University in the U.S. Having worked as a visiting professor and research fellow at Free University of Brussels, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, he was elected 21st Century COE Professor, Information Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo for 2003/2004, from where he held the first global