Rolf Pfeifer (born 24 February 1947 in Zürich, Switzerland) is a Swiss artificial-intelligence researcher. He earned a master's degree in physics and mathematics and a Ph.D. in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich), where Carl August Zehnder was affiliated with his doctoral studies. He subsequently spent three years as a post-doctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University and Yale University in the United States.

Pfeifer was a professor of computer science at the Department of Informatics at the University of Zurich and director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory until his retirement in 2014.^[6,2,12] Currently, he is a specially appointed professor at Osaka University and a visiting professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.^[13] He has also worked as a visiting professor and research fellow at the Free University of Brussels, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Neurosciences Institute (NSI) in San Diego, and the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. Elected "21st Century COE Professor, Information Science and Technology" at the University of Tokyo for 2003/2004, he initiated the first global, fully interactive, videoconferencing-based lecture series "The AI Lectures from Tokyo" (connecting Tokyo, Beijing, Jeddah, Warsaw, Munich, and Zürich), which were renamed the ShanghAI Lectures and have been broadcast worldwide since 2009.^[11]

His research interests and scientific work span cognitive science, artificial intelligence, robotics, embodied cognition (embodiment), biorobotics, autonomous agents/mobile robots, artificial life, morphology/morpho-functional machines, situated design, and emotion. Pfeifer has published over 100 scientific articles and is the author of books including Understanding Intelligence (co-authored with C. Scheier), How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence (MIT Press, 2006, with Josh Bongard), and Designing Intelligence (with Josh Bongard and Don Berry).

His published books include Understanding Intelligence, co-authored with Christian Scheier and published by Bradford Books in 2001. In 2006, he co-authored How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence with Josh Bongard, which was also published by Bradford Books. He later published Designing Intelligence Paperback through GRIN in 2013, with Josh Bongard and Don Berry.