Sethu Vijayakumar

Last updated

Professor Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE Sethu Vijayakumar.jpg
Professor Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE

Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE (born 1970 [1] ) is Professor of Robotics [2] at the University of Edinburgh and a judge [3] on the BBC2 show Robot Wars . He is the Programme co-Director [4] for Artificial Intelligence at The Alan Turing Institute, the UK's National Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, with the responsibility for defining and driving the institute's Robotics and Autonomous Systems agenda. He co-founded the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics [5] in 2015 and was instrumental in bringing the first [6] [7] NASA Valkyrie [8] humanoid robot out of the United States of America, and to Europe, where is it a focus of research at the School of Informatics. [9] He was elected [10] as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013.

Contents

Vijayakumar's articles on Incremental Online Learning in high dimensions, Natural Actor-Critic and other robot learning related publications have been cited [11] over 10000 times in academic papers and he is the recipient of the IEEE Transactions of Robotics (IEEE-TRO) King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award 2013. [12]

Career

After a PhD [13] in computer science and engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, during which he also worked as a research scientist at the Kawato Dynamic Brain Project in ATR, Kyoto, Vijayakumar became a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Information Synthesis, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan working with Professor Shun'ichi Amari. He then headed to the University of Southern California [14] as a presidential postdoctoral fellow with Professor Stefan Schaal and subsequently became a research assistant professor (2001–2003) in the Department of Computer Science at USC, Los Angeles.

In 2003, he moved to the University of Edinburgh, where he went on to become director of the Institute for Perception, Action and Behaviour in the School of Informatics and then Co-Director [15] of Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.

In 2007 Vijayakumar was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship in Learning Robotics, co-funded by Microsoft Research. [16] He is a Turing Fellow since 2018 and a Fellow of the European Laboratory on Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) since its inception in 2020.

Public engagement with science

Vijayakumar is an active science communicator, giving public talks and media interviews. In 2015 the University of Edinburgh awarded him its annual Tam Dalyell Prize for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science [17] and in 2016 he presented a series of robot demonstrations at the television launch [18] of BBC micro:bit live lessons. He featured in Stargazing Live with Dara O Briain, March 2017. He was a judge on the 2016-2018 revival of the robot combat TV show Robot Wars . Vijayakumar also delivered two TEDx talks on robotics and machine learning at TEDx Glasgow [19] 2018 and TEDx Edinburgh [20] 2015.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kevin Warwick</span> British engineer and robotics researcher

Kevin Warwick is an English engineer and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) at Coventry University. He is known for his studies on direct interfaces between computer systems and the human nervous system, and has also done research concerning robotics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raj Reddy</span> Indian-American computer scientist (born 1937)

Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-born American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of artificial intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years. He was the founding director of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He was instrumental in helping to create Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies in India, to cater to the educational needs of the low-income, gifted, rural youth. He is the chairman of International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad. He is the first person of Asian origin to receive the Turing Award, in 1994, known as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science, for his work in the field of artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Hinton</span> British-Canadian computer scientist and psychologist (born 1947)

Geoffrey Everest Hinton is a British-Canadian computer scientist and cognitive psychologist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks. From 2013 to 2023, he divided his time working for Google and the University of Toronto, before publicly announcing his departure from Google in May 2023, citing concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In 2017, he co-founded and became the chief scientific advisor of the Vector Institute in Toronto.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jack Dongarra</span> American computer scientist (born 1950)

Jack Joseph Dongarra is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is the American University Distinguished Professor of Computer Science in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Tennessee. He holds the position of a Distinguished Research Staff member in the Computer Science and Mathematics Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Turing Fellowship in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester, and is an adjunct professor and teacher in the Computer Science Department at Rice University. He served as a faculty fellow at the Texas A&M University Institute for Advanced Study (2014–2018). Dongarra is the founding director of the Innovative Computing Laboratory at the University of Tennessee. He was the recipient of the Turing Award in 2021.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh</span>

The School of Informatics is an academic unit of the University of Edinburgh, in Scotland, responsible for research, teaching, outreach and commercialisation in informatics. It was created in 1998 from the former department of artificial intelligence, the Centre for Cognitive Science and the department of computer science, along with the Artificial Intelligence Applications Institute (AIAI) and the Human Communication Research Centre.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephen Muggleton</span> Artificial intelligence researcher

Stephen H. Muggleton FBCS, FIET, FAAAI, FECCAI, FSB, FREng is Professor of Machine Learning and Head of the Computational Bioinformatics Laboratory at Imperial College London.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Austin Tate</span>

Austin Tate is Emeritus Professor of Knowledge-based systems in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. From 1985 to 2019 he was Director of AIAI in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christopher Bishop</span> British computer scientist (born 1959)

Christopher Michael Bishop is a British computer scientist. He is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Director of Microsoft Research AI4Science. He is also Honorary Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. Chris was a founding member of the UK AI Council, and in 2019 he was appointed to the Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Andrew Blake (scientist)</span> British scientist

Andrew Blake FREng, FRS, is a British scientist, former laboratory director of Microsoft Research Cambridge and Microsoft Distinguished Scientist, former director of the Alan Turing Institute, Chair of the Samsung AI Centre in Cambridge, honorary professor at the University of Cambridge, Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge, and a leading researcher in computer vision.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Manuela M. Veloso</span> Portuguese-American computer scientist

Manuela Maria Veloso is the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research & Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department. She served as president of Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of AAAI, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yann LeCun</span> French computer scientist (born 1960)

Yann André LeCun is a Turing Award winning French computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Professor of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and Vice-President, Chief AI Scientist at Meta.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Massimiliano Versace</span>

Massimiliano Versace is the co-founder and the CEO of Neurala Inc, a Boston-based company building Artificial Intelligence emulating brain function in software and used in automating the process of visual inspection in manufacturing. He is also the founding Director of the Boston University Neuromorphics Lab. Massimiliano Versace is a Fulbright scholar and holds two PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Trieste, Italy and Cognitive and Neural Systems from Boston University, USA. He obtained his BSc from the University of Trieste, Italy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James J. Kuffner Jr.</span> American roboticist

James J. Kuffner Jr. is an American roboticist and chief executive officer (CEO) of Woven by Toyota. Dr. Kuffner is also Chief Digital Officer and a member of the Board of Directors of Toyota Motor Corporation. Kuffner continues to serve as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and as Executive Advisor to Woven by Toyota. Kuffner earned a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nic Radford</span>

Nicolaus Adam Radford known as Nic Radford is an American engineer, roboticist, inventor, and entrepreneur raising over $250mm in funding for his companies. He is the former president and CEO of Nauticus Robotics, Inc. (NSADAQ:KITT) a robotics firm he founded. He also founded Jacobi Motors, his company spun out of HMI to commercialize his variable flux motor research from graduate school. He also started Rad Capital Ventures to invest in the trading of electricity. Prior to forming HMI, he spent 14 years at Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center's Dexterous Robotics Laboratory at NASA in Houston, Texas. Radford was the principal investigator tasked with leading the development of Valkyrie for participation in the 2013 DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) and NASA's future Mars robotics missions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Naira Hovakimyan</span> Armenian control theorist

Naira Hovakimyan is an Armenian control theorist who holds the W. Grafton and Lillian B. Wilkins professorship of the Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the director of AVIATE Center of flying cars at UIUC, funded through a NASA University Leadership Initiative. She was the inaugural director of the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory during 2015–2017, associated with the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucy Rogers</span> British science writer

Lucy Elizabeth Rogers is a British author, inventor, and engineer. She is a visiting professor of engineering, creativity and communication at Brunel University London and has served as a judge on the BBC Two show Robot Wars from 2016 to 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jan Peters (computer scientist)</span> German computer scientist

Jan Peters is a German computer scientist. He is Professor of Intelligent Autonomous Systems at Department of Computer Science of the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Bronstein</span> Israeli computer scientist, entrepreneur

Michael Bronstein is an Israeli computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is a computer science professor at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Aude Billard</span> Swiss physicist

Aude G. Billard is a Swiss physicist in the fields of machine learning and human-robot interactions. As a full professor at the School of Engineering at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Billard’s research focuses on applying machine learning to support robot learning through human guidance. Billard’s work on human-robot interactions has been recognized numerous times by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and she currently holds a leadership position on the executive committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) as the vice president of publication activities.

Helen Hastie is the Head of the School of Informatics of the University of Edinburgh and a RAEng/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow. She specialises in Human-Robot Interaction and Multimodal interfaces. Hastie has undertaken projects such as AI personal assistants for remote robots, autonomous systems and spoken dialogue systems for sectors in defence and energy. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

References

  1. ↑ "Sethu VIJAYAKUMAR pe". Companies House . Retrieved 7 December 2021.
  2. ↑ "Sethu Vijayakumar - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.co.uk. Retrieved 3 May 2017.
  3. ↑ "Sethu Vijayakumar". Robot Wars Wiki. Retrieved 31 October 2016.
  4. ↑ "Sethu Vijayakumar". The Alan Turing Institute. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  5. ↑ "Edinburgh Centre for Robotics". www.edinburgh-robotics.org. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  6. ↑ "NASA's Valkyrie Humanoid Upgraded, Delivered to Robotics Labs in U.S. and Europe". IEEE Spectrum: Technology, Engineering, and Science News. Retrieved 31 October 2016.
  7. ↑ "Humanoid robot Valkyrie arrives at Edinburgh University". BBC News. 4 May 2016. Retrieved 31 October 2016.
  8. ↑ Kisliuk, Erin (23 September 2015). "Valkyrie". NASA. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  9. ↑ "Edinburgh-NASA Valkyrie". valkyrie.inf.ed.ac.uk/. Retrieved 1 November 2016.
  10. ↑ "List of Elected Fellows 2013 on Royal Society of Edinburgh website" . Retrieved 12 October 2016.
  11. ↑ "Sethu Vijayakumar - Google Scholar Citations". scholar.google.co.uk. Retrieved 31 October 2016.
  12. ↑ Oyewole, Kenny. "IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award - IEEE Robotics and Automation Society". www.ieee-ras.org. Retrieved 31 October 2016.
  13. ↑ "Vijayakumar's page on University of Edinburgh website" . Retrieved 12 October 2016.
  14. ↑ "Vijayakumar's profile page on University of Southern California website" . Retrieved 12 October 2016.
  15. ↑ "Staff list page on Edinburgh Centre for Robotics website" . Retrieved 12 October 2016.
  16. ↑ "RAEng News". RAEng News: 4. Spring 2008.
  17. ↑ "Tam Dalyell Prize for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science | The University of Edinburgh". www.ed.ac.uk. Retrieved 31 October 2016.
  18. ↑ "BBC - Welcome to the micro:bit - Live Lesson". BBC. Retrieved 31 October 2016.
  19. ↑ "YouTube". www.youtube.com. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
  20. ↑ "YouTube". www.youtube.com. Retrieved 8 July 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.