Very outdates, see my new homepage ...
Research Statement
Integrating highly complex robots in daily life requires them to become more independent of preprogrammed behaviors and exception handling. As biological research has shown different complex movements are actually a result of the combination of simple motor primitives. This concept is also successfully applied to robotics but there remains still a lot of research to be done in order to make the current formulations more versatile. In nature as in robotics tasks are often learned by observation and imitation. In many cases the imitation is imperfect and has to be improved. Reinforcement Learning is a natural choice for this step.
| Educational Background | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 2008-2012 | Ph.D. Student | ||
| supervised by Jan Peters | |||
| Dept. Empirical Inference (Dept. Head: Bernhard Schölkopf), Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, Germany | |||
| 2007-2008 | Diplomarbeit (Master's thesis) | ||
| supervised by Jan Peters | |||
| Dept. Empirical Inference (Dept. Head: Bernhard Schölkopf), Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany | |||
| Thesis Title: Reinforcement Learning for Motor Primitives in Robotics | |||
| Thesis Topics: | |||
| - reinforcement learning to enhance motor primitives acquired by imitation learning | |||
| - reinforcement learning for perceptual coupling | |||
| - application of reinforcement learning on a Barrett WAM robot arm | |||
| 2006-2008 | Diplom-Ingenieur in Engineering Cybernetics (German M.Sc. majoring in automation & control) | ||
| University of Stuttgart, Germany | |||
| 2004-2006 | Centralien (French engineering degree with an integrated multidisciplinary approach) | ||
| Ecole Centrale Paris (double degree program T.I.M.E.), France | |||
| 2002-2004 | Vordiplom in Engineering Cybernetics | ||
| University of Stuttgart, Germany | |||
| 2001 | Abitur | ||
| Schlossgymnasium Künzelsau, Germany | |||
| 1999 | High School Diploma | ||
| Tulelake, CA, USA | |||
| Research Positions (outdated) | |||
| 2015-present | Assistant Professor | ||
| Delft Center for Systems and Control, TU Delft, The Netherlands | |||
| 2012-2014 | PostDoc | ||
| CoR-Lab, Universität Bielefeld / Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany | |||
| 2011 | Summer Intern | ||
| Disney Research Pittsburgh (Host: Michael Mistry, Head: Jessica Hodgins), USA | |||
| 2009 | Visiting Researcher | ||
| Department of Communication and Cognitive Cybernetics (Host: Erhan Oztop, Head: Mitsuo Kawato), Advanced Telecommunication Research Center (ATR), Kyoto, Japan | |||
| 2005-2006 | Student Researcher | ||
| Project Quadricopt�re: hardware in the loop for a mini-drone | |||
| Ecole Centrale Paris & Ecole des Mines, France | |||
| 2003-2004 | Student Researcher | ||
| Lehrstuhl f�r Bauphysik, University of Stuttgart, Germany | |||
| Teaching (outdated) | |||
| 2011-2012 | Teaching Assistant, Projektpraktikum: Lernende Roboter | ||
| Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany | |||
| 2008 | Lab Assistant, Graduate course: Praktikum Regelungstechnik I | ||
| Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control (IST), University of Stuttgart, Germany | |||
| Work Experience (outdated) | |||
| 2006 | Internship at Onboard-Controls | ||
| A�rodrome de Blois le Breuil, France | |||
| 2005 | Internship at Ing�nieurs Sans Fronti�res / SOS Sahel | ||
| Bamako & Sanankoroba, Mali | |||
| 2005 | Part-time work at Aviation sans Fronti�res | ||
| Paris, France | |||
| 2001-2002 | Civil Service at Kivuli Centre | ||
| Nairobi, Kenya | |||
| Invited talks at Labs (outdated) | |||
| 07/07/2011 | Invited talk Reinforcement Learning of Motor Primitives for Robotics at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA, Host: Chris Atkeson | ||
| 15/01/2010 | Invited talk Learning Motor Primitives for Robotics at the EVENT Lab, Universitat de Barcelona, Spain, Seminar: Reinforcement learning in Robotics and Virtual Reality, Host: Jason Kastanis | ||
| 11/06/2009 | Invited talk Learning Motor Primitives for Robotics at the Computational Neuroscience Laboratories (CNS), Advanced Telecommunications Research Center (ATR), Kyoto, Japan, Host: Erhan Oztop | ||
| Oral Conference and Workshop Presentations (outdated) | |||
| 04/05/2010 | Conference presentation Movement Templates for Learning of Hitting and Batting at IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) | ||
| 03/12/2009 | Conference presentation Learning new basic Movements for Robotics at Fachgespr�ch Autonome Mobile Systeme (AMS). | ||
| 10/09/2009 | Forum presentation Policy Search for Motor Primitives at Young Researcher's Forum: Annual Symposium of the German Association for Pattern Recognition (DAGM). | ||
| 15/05/2009 | Conference presentation Learning Motor Primitives for Robotics at IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). | ||
| 01/04/2009 | Conference presentation Using Reward-Weighted Imitation for Robot Reinforcement Learning at the IEEE International Symposium on Approximate Dynamic Programming and Reinforcement Learning (ADPRL). | ||
| 09/12/2008 | Conference presentation Policy Search for Motor Primitives in Robotics at Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). | ||
| 23/09/2008 | Conference presentation Learning Perceptual Coupling for Motor Primitives at IEEE/RSJ Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). | ||
| 15/05/2008 | Workshop presentation Reinforcement Learning of Perceptual Coupling for Motor Primitives at the European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL). | ||
| Awards and Honors (outdated) | |||
| 2001-2012 | e-fellows.net scholarship. | ||
| 2008 | Travel Award for Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). | ||
| 2008 | Travel Grant for the European Workshop on Reinforcement Learning (EWRL). | ||
| 2006 | TIME scholarship. | ||
| 2000 | Bundeswettbewerb Mathematik 1st round, 3rd place (German National Math Competition) | ||
| 1998 | Landeswettbewerb Mathematik Baden-W�rttemberg 1st place (Federal State Math Competition) | ||
| 1997 | Landeswettbewerb Mathematik Baden-W�rttemberg 2nd place (Federal State Math Competition) | ||
| Paper Reviewing (outdated) | |||
| 2011 | IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) | ||
| International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2012) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) International Conference on Robotic Systems (IROS) International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids) IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC) | |||
| 2010 | IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) | ||
| Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (R:SS) IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2011) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) International Conference on Robotic Systems (IROS) International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids) Annual German Conference on Artificial Intelligence (KI) | |||
| 2009 | Autonomous Robots Journal | ||
| IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2010) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) | |||
| 2008 | IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) | ||
| IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2009) Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) International Conference on Robotic Systems (IROS) IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) | |||
| References, etc. | |||
| References are available upon request. | |||