bio

After graduating with a Master’s degree in computer science (German “Diplom-Informatiker”) from Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany in 2006, I obtained my PhD degree at the chair of Automation Technology at TU Chemnitz, supervised by Prof. Peter Protzel in April 2012. For my PhD thesis I focused on robust graph-based models for SLAM and probabilistic estimation.

After two more years as a postdoc in Chemnitz I joined the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group at at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane in March 2014. In August 2014 I became a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision at QUT.

I joined the faculty at QUT in 2017 as a Lecturer (roughly equivalent to a tenured Assistant Professor position in the US system) and have been promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2018 and to Associate Professor in 2020. I was appointed Chief Investigator of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision in 2018. Since 2020 I am Chief Investigator, Program Leader, and member of the Executive Committee of the QUT Centre for Robotics. In 2022 I was promoted to full Professor and became Deputy Director (Research) of the ARC-funded Industrial Transformation Research Hub ARIAM. In 2023 I became Deputy Director of QUT’s Centre for Robotics.

I conduct research in robotic vision, at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. My research interests focus on robot learning for manipulation, planning and naviation, as well as scene understanding. I regularly organise workshops at robotics and computer vision conferences, such as RSS, CVPR, and ICRA.

Teaching and Unit Coordination Experience

• since 2023: ENN585 – Advanced Machine Learning (Master’s of Robotics and AI), Unit Coordinator and Lecturer
• since 2023: ENN583 – Foundations of Robotic Vision (Master’s of Robotics and AI), Unit Coordinator and Lecturer
• 2020 – 2022: EGH444 – Digital Signals and Image Processing, (4th year unit, Bachelor’s course at QUT), Lecturer
• 2018 – 2023: EGH419 – Mechatronics Design 3, (4th year unit, Bachelor’s course at QUT), Unit Coordinator and Lecturer
• 2017 – 2022: EGB339 – Introduction to Robotics, (3rd year unit, Bachelor’s course at QUT), Unit Coordinator and Lecturer
• 2012 & 2013: Autonomous Systems, (Masters’s course at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany) Lecturer
• 2012 & 2013: Simulation and Software Laboratory, (Bachelor’s course at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany), Lecturer
• 2006 – 2013: Mobile Robotics, (Bachelor’s course at Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany), Associate Lecturer, Guest Lecturer

Reviews and Community Service

I served on the Editorial Board for the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) from 2019 to 2022 and was IEEE Technical Committee co-chair for Computer and Robot Vision. Between 2015 and 2019 I was Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters journal (RA-L), and served as an AE for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 2017/18. I have been serving regularly as a reviewer for the major journals (IJRR, TRO, RAS, IJFR) and major conferences (RSS, CoRL, ICRA, IROS, FSR, Intelligent Vehicles Symposium) in our field for many years.

I regularly serve as an Assessor for the Australian Research Council (ARC) and provide expert reviews since 2016.

I was coordinating guest editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) on the topic of Deep Learning in Robotics, published in 2018. I am guest editor for a special issue of the International Journal of Computer Vision (IJCV) on the topic of Deep Learning for Robotic Vision, published in 2020.

Attended Conferences, Workshops, and Summer Schools