Prof. Auke Jan Ijspeert

Short bio:

Auke Ijspeert is an associate professor at the EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne), and head of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group (BIRG). He has a BSc/MSc in Physics from the EPFL, and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the University of Edinburgh (with John Hallam and David Willshaw as advisors). He carried out postdocs at IDSIA and EPFL (LAMI) with Jean-Daniel Nicoud and Luca Gambardella, and at the University of Southern California (USC), with Michael Arbib and Stefan Schaal. He then became a research assistant professor at USC, and an external collaborator at ATR (Advanced Telecommunications Research institute) in Japan. In 2002, he came back to the EPFL first as a SNF assistant professor, and since October 2009 as an associate professor (with tenure). His research interests are at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and applied machine learning. He is interested in using numerical simulations and robots to get a better understanding of animal locomotion and movement control, and in using inspiration from biology to design novel types of robots and locomotion controllers (see for instance Ijspeert et al, Science, Vol. 315. no. 5817, pp. 1416 - 1420, 2007). He is regularly invited to give talks on these topics. With his colleagues, he has received the Best Paper Award at ICRA2002, the Industrial Robot Highly Commended Award at CLAWAR2005, and the Best Paper Award at the IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2007 conference. He is an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and has acted as guest editor for the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Autonomous Robots, and Biological Cybernetics. He is/was the Technical Program Chair of 5 international conferences (BioADIT2004, SAB2004, AMAM2005, BioADIT2006, LATSIS2006), and has been a program committee member of over 40 conferences. Please visit the BIRG Home and BIRG publication pages for more information about his research and publications.

Research interests:

• Articulated and biologically inspired robotics
• Modular robotics
• Humanoid robotics
• Control of locomotion and of coordinated movements in robots
• Computational neuroscience, neural networks, sensorimotor coordination in animals
• Nonlinear dynamics, systems of coupled oscillators
• Optimization and learning algorithms
• Numerical simulation
• Dynamic simulators of articulated rigid bodies

Publications:

• See the BIRG publications page

Awards:

• [co-author] Best paper award at the IEEE-RAS Humanoids 2007 conference.
• [co-author] with Ludovic Righetti (first author), finalist (out of three) for the Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA06) out of 1756 submitted, 680 accepted articles.
• [co-author] The Industrial Robot Highly Commended Award for a paper presented at the 8th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR 2005), September 2005.
• Award from the Latsis Foundation to organize the EPFL-Latsis 2006 symposium at EPFL (Main organizer). Co-organizers: Martin Hasler (LANOS, EPFL), Wulfram Gerstner (LCN, EPFL), Henry Markram (LNMC, EPFL), Aude Billard (ASL, EPFL), and Dario Floreano (LIS, EPFL), August 2005.
• Second prize of the First EURON - Technology Transfer Award to Olivier Michel for his robot simulator Webots; in the framework of a CTI grant between Auke Ijspeert and Olivier Michel (Cyberbotics), March 2004.
• Overall Best Paper Award (out of 1,172 submitted, 689 accepted papers) at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2002), Washington D.C., May 2002.
• Young Professorship award from the Swiss National Science Foundation (2002-2006)
• Grant for young researcher from the Swiss National Science Foundation (1999-2000).
• Marie Curie Scholarship from the European Commission (13% acceptance rate, 1997-1998).
• Winner of the University of Edinburgh "robot-rugby" competition 1996 (out of 16 teams).
• Grant for young researcher from the Swiss National Science Foundation (1995-1996).

Current and Past Funding:

• Swiss National Science Foundation,
• SystemsX, The Swiss Initiative in Systems Biology
• US National Science Foundation,
• European Commission (Information Society Technologies),
• EPFL (two FIFO grants and one equipment grant),
• European Space Agency,
• French Ministere de la Recherche et de la Technologie (program Neurosciences Integratives et Computationnelles),
• Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI),
• Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Talks:

• See the separate Talks page

Teaching:

• Models of biological sensory-motor systems, master course for Computer Science and Communication Science students, EPFL. Fall semesters 2005-2006, 2006-2007, 2007-2008. See the course's Moodle website.
• Autonomous Robots, doctoral course (with Aude Billard, Dario Floreano and Alcherio Martinoli), EPFL. Spring semesters 2007,2008.
• Genetic and developmental computing architectures (with Gianluca Tempesti), master course for Computer Science and Communication Science students, EPFL. Fall semester 2005-2006.
• Biologically Inspired Artificial Intelligence, Undergraduate course WS03 410, Department of Computer Science, University of Zurich. Fall semester 2003-2004.
• Reinforcement Learning (with Stefan Schaal and Sethu Vijayakumar), Advanced Graduate Level Course CS599, Department of Computer Science, USC. Fall semester 2001-2002.
• Supervision of undergraduate and master research projects, over 70 students. See the Student projects.

Organizer / Program Chair of the following conferences/workshops:

Program Committee Member of the following conferences:

Reviewer:

ACM Transactions on Adaptive and Autonomous Systems, Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, Autonomous Robots, Biological Cybernetics, Cognitive Systems Research, European Journal of Neuroscience, IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, IEEE Transactions on Systems Man and Cybernetics, Journal of Theoretical Biology, Neural Networks, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Science, SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems.

Edited books (proceedings):

Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior, From Animals to Animats 8 (SAB 2004), S. Schaal, A.J. Ijspeert, A. Billard, S. Vijayakumar, J. Hallam, and J.-A. Meyer (Editors), MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004. ISBN 0-262-69341-0.

Biologically Inspired Approaches to Information Technology, First International Workshop, Bio-ADIT2004, A.J. Ijspeert, M. Murata, and N. Wakamiya (Editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 3141, Springer, Berlin, 2004. ISBN 3-540-23339-3.

Biologically Inspired Approaches to Advanced Information Technology · Second International Workshop, Bio-ADIT2006, Ijspeert, A.J., Masuzawa, T., Kusumoto, S. (Editors), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3853, 2006, ISBN 3-540-31253-6.

Dynamical Principles for Neuroscience and Intelligent Biomimetic Devices - Abstracts of the EPFL-LATSIS Symposium 2006, Auke Jan Ijspeert, Jonas Buchli, Allen Selverston, Mikhail Rabinovich, Martin Hasler, Wulfram Gerstner, Aude Billard, Henry Markram and Dario Floreano (Eds), EPFL, Lausanne, 2006, ISBN 978-2-8399-0134-5

Contact:

Prof. Auke Jan Ijspeert
School of Computer and Communication Sciences
EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
EPFL-IC-ISIM-GRIJ INN 237
Station 14
CH 1015, Lausanne, Switzerland
Tel: (+41) 21 693 2658 Fax: (+41) 21 693 3705
WWW: http://birg.epfl.ch/