Auke Jan Ijspeert

Auke Ijspeert is an associate professor at the EPFL (the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne), and head of the Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob), previously 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 BioRob Home and BioRob publication pages or have a look at his full CV for more information about his research and publications.