| Sep 23, 2024 | We presented our abstract about applying co-design to snake robots at the 40th ICRA anniversity conference (ICRA@40) in Rotterdam, Netherlands. This was work done by my two amazing Master students Riccardo Pretto and Sylvia Cressman, in collaboration with Michael Andrew Jansen from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, and my two finnish collegues Shivam Chaubey and Ville Kyrki. |
| Sep 16, 2024 | Happy to welcome Mohammadreza Nakhaei as a visiting PhD student to my group for the next 5 months. |
| Sep 01, 2024 | Bringing more Robotics to the VU Amsterdam! Starting now in the new academic year we will have for the first time a foundational Robotics course in the CS/AI curriculum for Bachelor students. Lot’s of work, but we have assembled a great team with Kim Baraka as co-teacher and Mark Adamik as the lead for the practicals. |
| Aug 30, 2024 | I presented our work on Accelerating Laboratory Automation Through Robot Skill Learning For Sample Scraping at IEEE CASE 2024 in Bari, Italy. This was a collaboration with an amazing team at the University of Liverpool, shout-out to my awesome collegue Gabriella Pizzuto for putting this work together! The paper was also nominated for the Best Healthcare Application award at CASE 2024! |
| Jul 25, 2024 | I gave an invited talk about our research on Co-Design with Robot Learning at the MILA Robot Learning Seminar. |
| Jul 15, 2024 | Congratulations to Sergio Hernandez! Our paper Following Ancestral Footsteps: Co-Designing Agent Morphology and Behaviour with Self-Imitation Learning won the best paper award at the R:SS Workshop on Embodiment-Aware Robot Learning (EARL). |
| Jul 15, 2024 | I gave an invited talk at the R:SS Workshop on Embodiment-Aware Robot Learning (EARL) with the title “Co-Adaptation of Robot Design & Behavior: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective”. |
| Jul 10, 2024 | We are hiring: We are looking for a postdoctoral researcher interested to work on Large Language Models, Representation Learning and Robot Learning. In the context of the NWO funded project TeNet we have a short-term postdoctoral position at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam for a maximum of 1 year, with the possibility of a research visit at the Finnish Center for AI and Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland, including a secondment to FCAI for 2-3 months. If this sounds interesting to you, consider applying here. |
| Jun 04, 2024 | Our work on automated chemical experiments with robots powered by reinforcement learning got accepted to CASE 2024! Congratulations to the lead author and professor/lecturer Gabriella Pizzuto, check out her awesome research in lab robotics here. Find the arxiv version of the paper here. |
| May 14, 2024 | Are you interested in working with me as a PhD student? Then have a look at our job opening for a 4-year PhD position in Robot Learning and Representation Learning at the VU Amsterdam. Deadline is 30th of June, applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis. |
| Apr 29, 2024 | I will be on part-time parental leave with changing patterns until November 2024. I may be slow to react to emails, review invitations etc. |
| Apr 29, 2024 | I am co-organizer and editor for the ELLIS Robust ML & ELLIS Robust Large Language Models workshops to be held in Oxford, UK, and Helsinki, Finland. Consider attending and submitting! |
| Apr 05, 2024 | I am a recipient of the NWO AIned XS grant provided by the Dutch Research Council and the AIned Foundation. In this projct we will be developing new methods using Large Language Models for policy generation for real-world robotics. Sounds interesting? Keep a look out for our postdoc advertisement and more details in the near future! |
| Apr 05, 2024 | I will be giving an invited talk about our research on co-adapting robot morphology and behaviour with reinforcement learning at the EARL workshop. Are you also working on Co-Adaptation/Co-Design of robots or evolutionary robots? Consider submitting a workshop paper and let’s chat at R:SS 2024 in Delft, The Netherlands! |
| Feb 16, 2024 | Maria Sliacka’s paper about Co-Imagination, model-based Co-Design of agent’s body and behaviour with dreaming/data-augmentation, is published by Springer. Congratulations! |
| Feb 01, 2024 | I will be Editor for the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS) 2024 |
| Nov 20, 2023 | Currently evaluating reinforcement learning on biological systems: I am on parental leave until February 2024 |
| Nov 15, 2023 | I am one of three finalists for the Outstanding Associate Editor Award at the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems 20203 |
| Sep 20, 2023 | Our papers on disentangled representations for RL and Equivariances in Neural Processes got accepted to NeurIPS 2023! |
| Sep 20, 2023 | I presented our paper on Model-Based Co-Adaptation at LOD 2023 |
| Sep 08, 2023 | I am a co-organizer of the ELLIS Robust ML Workshop. |
| Sep 07, 2023 | I joined the ELLIS society (European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems). |
| Sep 01, 2023 | I started my new position as Assistant Professor of Computational Intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. |
| Apr 07, 2023 | We are going to present our paper Co-Imitation: Learning Design and Behaviour by Imitation at AAAI-23 in Washington DC. Visit our oral talk in the HAI: Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning track at 2PM, or visit us at poster 166 on Thursday, 9th of February. |
| Feb 10, 2023 | We are going to present our paper Co-Imitation: Learning Design and Behaviour by Imitation at AAAI-23 in Washington DC. Visit our oral talk in the HAI: Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning track at 2PM, or visit us at poster 166 on Thursday, 9th of February. |
| Jan 07, 2023 | Our paper about learning disentangled embeddings with Mhairi Dunion Temporal Disentanglement of Representations for Improved Generalisation in Reinforcement Learning was accepted for ICLR 2023! |
| Dec 12, 2022 | I gave an invited talk about our work in the area of co-adaptation of robot morphology and behaviour at the AI Initiave at KAUST, Saudi Arabia. |
| Dec 01, 2022 | Visit our posters at the NeurIPS workshop for Deep Reinforcement Learning 2022, with Mhairi Dunion and Chang Rajani presenting their PhD work! |
| Nov 01, 2022 | I presented out research about evolving robots and latent embeddings together with Mhairi Dunion at the Finnish AI Day in two oral talks. |