Qualifications
BSc; MSc; Dr. rer. nat. (PhD)
Academic background
I am a Departmental Lecturer in Robotics in the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. At ORI, I lead the Cognitive Robotics Group (CRG).
I am also the Technical Lead at the Responsible Technology Institute (RTI), an international centre of excellence focused on responsible technology at Oxford University; and a Programme Fellow of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP).
I am currently an editor of both the Journal of Responsible Technology and the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence.
I studied Cognitive Science (BSc, 2006) and Computer Science (MSc, 2008) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and partly at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
I received my PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2014. During his PhD, I worked on methods for naive physics and common-sense reasoning in the context of everyday robot manipulation. I contributed to several national, European, and international projects including RoboHow, RoboEarth, and the PR2 Beta programme.
In May 2013, I was appointed Research Fellow in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science at Birmingham University. There I worked on qualitative spatio-temporal models for perception planning and knowledge-enabled perception, contributing to the European research projects STRANDS and ALOOF.
I was a visiting researcher in the JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, Japan (summer 2011) and the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, USA (spring 2015).
Undergraduate teaching
At Christ Church I teach students in various courses in the Computer Science, Mathematics and Computer Science, and Computer Science and Philosophy programmes including Linear Algebra, Concurrent Programming, Algorithms, as well as Introduction to Formal Proof.
Research interests
My research interests lie in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). My goal is to enable robots to understand their surroundings, to act autonomously, and to explain their own behaviour in meaningful human terms. To this end, my research concerns the design and development of fundamental AI techniques for autonomous robot systems. I focus on the combination of knowledge representation, reasoning, machine learning, and robot perception, motivated by applications in complex, real-world environments.