Ales Ude

I am the head of Department of Automatics, Biocybernetics and Robotics, Jožef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the founder of the Humanoid and Cognitive Robotics Lab, which operates within the department. I am also associated with ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan. My main research interests are in applying the results of the research on human motor control and perception to the creation of cognitive agents, such as for example humanoid robots. My research focuses on various issues in robot learning, especially imitation learning and learning by exploration, where I combine statistical learning techniques and reinforcement learning to increase the efficiency and autonomy of the acquisition of new sensorimotor behaviors. I am also interested in humanoid robot vision with the focus on learning object representations, object recognition, and foveated vision. Finally, I study mechanisms to integrate active perception and manipulation in robots that operate in natural environments. I have been a principal investigator at Jožef Stefan Institute for several European projects (STREPs and IPs), bilateral projects with ATR, and national projects. My publication record consists of over 100 papers in referred journals and conferences. I have been involved with the preparation of major robotics conferences such as ICRA, IROS, Robotics: Systems and Science, and Humanoids for many years. In 2011 I was a general chair of IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids). I co-organized more than 10 workshops at Humanoids and ICRA.