Herke van Hoof

Herke van Hoof joined the IAS lab at september 15th 2011 as a PhD student. Before that, he got his bachelor and master degrees in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Within this degree, Herke focused on autonomous systems and perception, writing his bachelor thesis on "Using different methods to attract a robot's attention" under supervision of Gert Kootstra.

During his master's, Herke got involved with RoboCup competitions, first in the 3D soccer simulation student team 'The little green BATS'. He proceeded to do an internship at INSERM in Lyon, France, where he participated in a RoboCup@Home team and worked on his master thesis on "Interaction between face detection and learning tracking systems" which explored ways to make different perception subsystems train each other to improve robot performance continuously. This work was done under the supervision of Tijn van der Zant, Peter Ford Dominey, and Marco Wiering.

Currently, Herke is working on efficient exploration strategies of unknown objects. In non-standardized, unstructured environments robots such as a human household, robots need to be able to handle unknown objects. By manipulating the unknown object, the robots learns about the structure and properties of the object, as well as its affordances. However, as it is unfeasible to try out all possible explorative actions, the actions that are most likely to teach the robot about its environment have to be selected.

Research Interests

Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Visuo-Motor Coordination, Robotics, Intrinsically Motivated Learning, Active Learning, Active Perception, Autonomous Exploration

CV and Publications

Herke's CV can be found here.

A list of my publications can be found on this page.

Contact Information

Mail: Herke van Hoof, TU Darmstadt, FB Informatik, FG IAS, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt
Office: Room E327, Robert-Piloty Gebaeude S2|02
work +49-6151-16-5669
fax +49-6151-167374

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