2019 Annual Report

Our Centre is made up of some of the most talented researchers in the world whose passion for robotics is helping to shape the future.

Chief Investigators (CIs)

Peter Corke

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Peter Corke is a distinguished Professor at the Queensland University of Technology and director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision in Australia. Previously he was a Senior Principal Research Scientist at the CSIRO ICT Centre where he founded and led the Autonomous Systems laboratory.  He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE) and Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (HEA).

He was the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation magazine; founding editor of the Journal of Field Robotics; member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research, and the Springer STAR series. He has over 500 publications in the field, a h-index of 63 and over 20,000 citations. Peter has held visiting positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute, and Oxford University.

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Ian Reid

University of Adelaide, Australia

Ian Reid interests range across computer vision and are currently focused on life-long visual learning, and developing high-level representations for image and video understanding, especially those that can be computed and queried sufficiently rapidly to enable real-time robotic decision making and control. He has previous published widely in areas such as active vision, visual SLAM, visual geometry, human motion capture and intelligent visual surveillance. He has published widely on these topics in major journals and conferences, with more than 21,000 citations and a h-index of 70.

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Stephen Gould

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Stephen Gould is a Professor in the Research School of Computer Science in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the Australian National University. He received his BSc degree in mathematics and computer science and BE degree in electrical engineering from the University of Sydney in 1994 and 1996, respectively. He received his MS degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1998. He then worked in industry for a number of years where he co-founded Sensory Networks, which sold to Intel in 2013. In 2005 he returned to PhD studies and earned his PhD degree from Stanford University in 2010. His research interests include computer and robotic vision, machine learning, probabilistic graphical models, deep learning and optimization.

In 2017, Steve spent a year in Seattle leading a team of computer vision researchers and engineers at Amazon before returning to Australia in 2018.

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Tom Drummond

Monash University, Australia

Professor Drummond is a Chief Investigator based at Monash. He studied a BA in mathematics at the University of Cambridge.  In 1989 he emigrated to Australia and worked for CSIRO in Melbourne for four years before moving to Perth for his PhD in Computer Science at Curtin University.  In 1998 he returned to Cambridge as a post-doctoral Research Associate and in 1991 was appointed as a University Lecturer.  In 2010 he returned to Melbourne and took up a Professorship at Monash University.  His research is principally in the field of real-time computer vision (ie processing of information from a video camera in a computer in real-time typically at frame rate), machine learning and robust methods. These have applications in augmented reality, robotics, assistive technologies for visually impaired users as well as medical imaging.

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Gustavo Carneiro

University of Adelaide, Australia

Gustavo Carneiro is a Chief Investigator in the Centre, and Project Leader (Learning). He is a Professor of the School of Computer Science at the University Adelaide. He joined the University of Adelaide as a senior lecturer in 2011, became an associate professor in 2015, and full professor in December 2018. His main research interest are in the fields of computer vision, medical image analysis and machine learning. In particular, in medical image analysis, Gustavo is developing multimodal methods to analyse medical images using deep learning techniques, and in computer vision his focus is in the development of new training procedures for deep learning methods and the development of feature learning approaches.

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Tat-Jun Chin

University of Adelaide, Australia

Tat-Jun Chin received his PhD in computer systems engineering from Monash University in 2007, which was supported by the Endeavour Australia-Asia Award. He is currently an Associate Professor at The University of Adelaide, and a Chief Investigator of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision (ACRV), and the Director for Machine Learning for Space at The Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML). Tat-Jun is an Associate Editor of the IPSJ Transactions on Computer Vision and Applications (TCVA) and Journal of Imaging (J. Imaging). Tat-Jun’s research interest lies in optimisation for computer vision and machine learning, and their application to robotic vision, space engineering and smart cities. He has published more than 90 research articles on the subject, and has won several awards for his research, including a CVPR award (2015), a BMVC award (2018), two DST Awards (2015, 2017), and an Best of ECCV (2018) special issue invitation.

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Elizabeth Croft

Monash University, Australia

Professor Elizabeth A. Croft (B.A.Sc UBC ’88, M.A.Sc Waterloo ’92, Ph.D. Toronto ’95) is the Dean of Engineering at Monash University and Professor in the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering.  Her research in industrial robotics and human-robot interaction advances the design of intelligent controllers and interaction methods that underpin how people and autonomous, collaborative systems can work together in a safe, predictable, and helpful manner.

Elizabeth joined the Centre as an Associate Investigator in February 2018, and became a Centre Chief Investigator in 2019.

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Feras Dayoub

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Feras is interested in the reliable deployment of machine learning and computer vision on mobile robots in challenging environments. Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) as the computer vision lead on the COTSBot project. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) as part of a project on assisted autonomy during the inspection of power infrastructure. Mobile service robots as a research fellow on an Australian research council discovery project on lifelong robotic navigation using visual perception.

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Matthew Dunbabin

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Professor Matthew Dunbabin joined QUT as a Principal Research Fellow (Autonomous Systems) in 2013. He is known internationally for his research into field robotics, particularly environmental robots, and their application to large-scale marine and aquatic ecosystem process monitoring. He has wide research interests including vision-based navigation, image-based habitat classification, adaptive sampling and path planning, as well as robot and sensor network interactions. His current research within the ACRV is focused on “environmental vision”.

He started his professional career in 1995 as a project engineer at Roaduser Research International, and following his PhD joined the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in the Autonomous Systems Laboratory. At CSIRO he held various roles including Principal Research Scientist, project leader and the Robotics Systems and Marine Robotics team leader before moving to QUT in 2013.

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Richard Hartley

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Richard is renowned as the founder of the field of multi-view geometry in computer vision – his text has received over 12500 citations.  Richard has been at the Australian National University since January 2001. He is also the Program Leader for the Autonomous Systems and Sensor Technology Program of NICTA.  Richard worked at the General Electric Research and Development Center from 1985 to 2001. He became involved with Image Understanding and Scene Reconstruction working with GE’s Simulation and Control Systems Division which built large-scale flight-simulators.

From 1995 he was GE project leader for a shared-vision project with Lockheed-Martin involving design and implementation of algorithms for an AFIS (fingerprint analysis) system being developed under a Lockheed-Martin contract with the FBI. This involved work in feature extraction, interactive fingerprint editing and fingerprint database matching. In 2000, he co-authored (with Andrew Zisserman) a book for Cambridge University Press, summarizing the previous decade’s research in this area. (Over 34,000 citations and an h-index of 57).

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Hongdong Li

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Chief Investigator Professor Hongdong Li has been with the College of Engineering and Computer Science, the Australian National University (ANU). He joined the ANU Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering (RSISE) from 2004 first as a Postdoctoral Fellow and then Research Fellow and a Senior Fellow. He was seconded to National ICT Australia (NICTA) as a Senior Research Scientist during 2008-2010 working on the Australia Bionic Eye Project. From 2010 he took a tenured position with ANU, doing teaching and research in computer vision and robotics at ANU. He as one of the fouding CIs joined the ACRV since 2014. During 2017—2018 he was a Visiting Professor with the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh.

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Robert Mahony

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Rob Mahony is a Professor in the Research School of Engineering at the Australian National University and has been a Chief Investigator with the Centre since its inauguration in 2014. His research interests are in non-linear systems theory with applications in robotics and computer vision.

He wrote the seminal paper providing a clear exposition of non-linear complementary filters on the special orthogonal group for attitude estimation; an enabling technology in the early development of quadrotor aerial robotic vehicles.  He was the first to provide a principled analysis for using optical flow of control of aerial robotic vehicles and was a coauthor on the first experimental paper that demonstrated landing of a quadrotor vehicle on a textured but featureless moving surface.  In 2016, Rob was named a Fellow of the IEEE, recognising his contribution to the control aspects of aerial robotics.

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Michael Milford

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Professor Milford conducts interdisciplinary research at the boundary between robotics, neuroscience and computer vision and is a multi-award winning educational entrepreneur. His research models the neural mechanisms in the brain underlying tasks like navigation and perception to develop new technologies in challenging application domains such as all-weather, anytime positioning for autonomous vehicles. He is also one of Australia’s most in demand experts in technologies including self-driving cars, robotics and artificial intelligence, and is a passionate science communicator. He currently holds the position of Professor at the Queensland University of Technology, as well as Australian Research Council Future Fellow, Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow and Chief Investigator at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision.

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Jonathan Roberts

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Jonathan is Professor in Robotics at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). His main research interest is in the areas of Field, Medical and Design Robotics and in particular making machines operate autonomously in unstructured or semi-structured environments. Jonathan joined QUT in 2014 as Professor in Robotics and co-founded QUT’s Medical and Healthcare Robotics team while at the same time co-developed QUT’s capability in the area of Design Robotics with his close collaborator Dr Jared Donovan.

Jonathan is a Past President of the Australian Robotics & Automation Association Inc. He currently serves as a Senior Editor of the IEEE Journal of Robotics and Automation Letters, and as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Field Robotics. He was Deputy Research Director of the Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA), a joint venture between CSIRO and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) from 2008 to 2013.  Jonathan regularly appears in the media (radio and TV) and is a writer for The Conversation.

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Chunhua Shen

University of Adelaide, Australia

Chunhua Shen is a Professor at School of Computer Science, University of Adelaide. He is also an adjunct Professor of Data Science and AI at Monash University.

Prior to that, he was with the computer vision program at NICTA (National ICT Australia), Canberra Research Laboratory for about six years. His research interests are in the intersection of computer vision and statistical machine learning. He studied at Nanjing University, at Australian National University, and received his PhD degree from the University of Adelaide. From 2012 to 2016, he held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. He is Associate Editor (AE) of the Pattern Recognition journal, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology; and served as AEs for a few journals including IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems.

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Niko Sünderhauf

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Dr Niko Suenderhauf is a Chief Investigator of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, and a Senior Lecturer at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia (a Senior Lecturer is roughly equivalent to a junior Associate Professor in the US system).

Niko conducts research in robotic vision, at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. His research interests focus on scene understanding and how robots can learn to perform complex tasks that require navigation and interaction with objects, the environment, and with humans.

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Anton van den Hengel

University of Adelaide, Australia

Prof van den Hengel and his team have developed world leading methods in a range of areas within Computer Vision and Machine learning, including methods which have placed first on a variety of international leader boards such as: PASCAL VOC (2015 & 2016), CityScapes (2016 & 2017), Virginia Tech VQA (2016 & 2017), and the Microsoft COCO Captioning Challenge (2016).

Prof van den Hengel’s team placed 4th in the ImageNet detection challenge in 2015 ahead of Google, Intel, Oxford, CMU and Baidu, and 2nd in ImageNet Scene Parsing in 2016. ImageNet is one of the most hotly contested challenges in Computer Vision.

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Gordon Wyeth

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Gordon is Executive Dean of QUT’s Science and Engineering faculty and a Professor of Robotics who contributes to the Semantic Vision theme of the Centre. He also provides connections from Semantic Vision into the Vision and Action theme, and contributes to the development of robotic systems in the Centre’s Application areas.

Gordon holds a PhD and a Bachelor of Engineering degree (with honours) in Computer Systems Engineering. He is the President of IEEE Control Systems, Robotics and Automation Queensland chapter, former president of the Australian Robotics and Automation Association and has served in various leadership positions in the RoboCup International Federation. He serves in various editorial positions for leading international robotics journals and conferences. Gordon’s team has designed and constructed more than twenty types of robots, including flying robots, wall-climbing robots, high performance wheeled robots, legged robots, manipulators and a humanoid robot. His robot soccer team, the RoboRoos, have been runners-up three times in the RoboCup World Cup of robot soccer. Gordon’s research is internationally recognised for building practical and useful robots that exploit, explain and expand models of living systems. (Over 2,000 citations and an h-index of 22).

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Associate Investigators (AIs)

Nick Barnes

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Nick Barnes is an Associate Investigator with our Centre. He received a PhD in computer vision for robot navigation in 1999 from the University of Melbourne. He was a visiting research fellow at the LIRA-Lab at the University of Genoa, Italy, supported by an Achiever Award from the Queens’ Trust for Young Australians before returning to Australia to lecture at the University of Melbourne, before joining NICTA’s Canberra Research Laboratory, now known as Data61@CSIRO.

He is currently a senior principal researcher and research group leader in computer vision for Data61 and ab Adjunct Associate Professor with the Australian National University. His research interests include visual dynamic scene analysis, wearable sensing, vision for low vision assistance, computational models of biological vision, feature detection, vision for vehicle guidance and medical image analysis.

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Ross Crawford

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Professor Crawford is an Orthopaedic Surgeon with a special interest in lower limb joint replacement; his principal interests are hip and knee replacement, and knee arthroscopy. Professor Crawford is an internationally recognized expert in the field of hip and knee replacement surgery. He performs approximately 150 hip and 150 knee replacements per year, both in public and private practice. He lectures and teaches surgical techniques both nationally and internationally.

As well as running a clinical practice Professor Crawford has a chair of orthopaedic research at the Queensland University of Technology. In this role he supervises PhD students, a number of post-doctoral researchers and collaborates closely with experts in the field of tissue engineering, cartilage degradation, cartilage mechanics, and clinical orthopaedics. The research in the outcomes of surgery performed under Professor Crawford’s care is an important part of his research practice.

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Anthony Dick

University of Adelaide, Australia

Anthony is an Associate Professor at The University of Adelaide’s School of Computer Science. He holds a Bachelors of Mathematics and Computer Science (Hons) from the University of Adelaide and received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 2001. Anthony’s interest areas include computer vision: that is, the problem of teaching computers how to see. He is interested in tracking lots of people or objects at once, and in building 3D models from video. (Over 2,400 citations and an h-index of 24).

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Anders Eriksson

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Anders Eriksson received his Msc degree in Electrical Engineering in 2000 and his PhD in mathematics in 2008, both from Lund University, Sweden. His research area include optimization theory and numerical methods applied to the fields of computer vision and machine learning. He was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Adelaide and a DECRA fellow with the Queensland University of Technology. He left QUT in 2019 to take up the position as Associate Professor, School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland.

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Clinton Fookes

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Clinton Fookes is a Professor in Vision & Signal Processing and the Speech, Audio, Image and Video Technologies group within the Science and Engineering Faculty at QUT. He holds a BEng (Aerospace/Avionics), an MBA, and a PhD in computer vision. Clinton actively researches in the fields of computer vision and machine learning including video surveillance, biometrics, human-computer interaction, and medical signal processing

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Jason Ford

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Jason is a Professor at QUT and an Associate Investigator in the Centre in the area of vision and action with application to remote inspection and monitoring. His has expertise is in decision systems for dynamic systems, including robotic and autonomous systems, that can reliably operate in the presence of uncertainty and error. His current research interests include aerial platform autonomy for infrastructure inspection and low signal-to-noise ratio anomalous signal detection with application in aerospace and other domains.

He graduated from the Australian National University with bachelor degrees in science and engineering, before furthering his interest in control systems by completing a PhD at the same institution.

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Felipe Gonzalez

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Associate Professor Felipe Gonzalez is an aeronautical engineer with a passion for innovation in the fields of aerial robotics and automation. He is interested in creating aerial robots, drones or UAVs that possess a high level of cognition using efficient on-board computer algorithms using advanced optimization and game theory approaches that assist us to understand and improve our physical and natural world. He is the co-author of several books in UAV based remote sensing and UAV based design based on evolutionary optimization and game strategies and as of 2019 has published over 135 refereed papers.

 

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Mehrtash Harandi

Monash University, Australia

Dr. Mehrtash Harandi is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University. He is also a contributing research scientist in the Machine Learning Research Group (MLRG) at Data61/CSIRO and joined the Centre as an Associate Investigator in September 2018.  Prior to this, he spent 5 years at the Canberra Research Laboratory-NICTA, working with Professor Richard Hartley and Professor Fatih Porikli.

With broad interests in machine learning, computer vision, and signal processing, he develops algorithms and mathematical models to equip machines with intelligence.  Mehrtash received $555K from Data61-CSIRO for the project “Trustworthy Learning from Limited Data” funded from 2018 to 2022, and the ARC Discovery Project “Semantic Vectorization: From Bitmaps to Intelligent Representations” of $385K from 2015-2019. His 2019 papers have been accepted into ICCV, CVPR, and ICML.

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Jonghyuk Kim

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Jon obtained his PhD degree in Field Robotics at the University of Sydney in 2004, pioneering the area of airborne simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM). He studied mechanical engineering at KAIST, South Korea and received his BS and MS degrees in electronics/control engineering at Chungnam National University, South Korea in 199 and 1999 respectively. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS) in Sydney before he joined ANU. He is the recipient of the Charles Sharpe Beecher Prize and Award from IMechE, UK, 2005 for his contributions to aerial robotics. He co-chaired ACRA (Australasian Conference in Robotics and Automation) in 2008 and served in Associate Editor roles for IEEE-IROS (2008) and IEEE ICRA (2010).

Jon has published more than 70 papers with Google citations of 1000+. His key contribution published in IEEE Transaction on Aerospace and Electronics System together with its companion conference paper has received over 300 citations showing significant impacts in aerial robotics.  (Over 1,345 citations and an h-index of 17).

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Dana Kulić

Monash University, Australia

Professor Dana Kulić received the combined B. A. Sc. and M. Eng. degree in electro-mechanical engineering, and the Ph. D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of British Columbia, Canada, in 1998 and 2005, respectively. From 2006 to 2009, Dana was a JSPS Post-doctoral Fellow and a Project Assistant Professor at the Nakamura-Yamane Laboratory at the University of Tokyo, Japan. In 2009, she established the Adaptive System Laboratory at the University of Waterloo, Canada, conducting research in human robot interaction, human motion analysis for rehabilitation and humanoid robotics.  Since 2019, Dana is a professor at Monash University, Australia. Her research interests include robot learning, humanoid robots, human-robot interaction and mechatronics.

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Hanna Kurniawati

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Hanna Kurniawati is a Senior Lecturer with the Australian National University (ANU) and Computer Science (CS) Futures Fellow at the Research School of Computer Science, ANU. Her research focuses on robust decision making and robot motion planning. She has been working on algorithms to enable robust decision theory become practical software tools. Such software tools will enable robots to design their own strategies, such as deciding what data to use, how to gather the data, and how to move, for accomplishing various tasks well, despite various modelling errors and types of uncertainty, and despite limited to no information about the system and its operating environment.

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Chris Lehnert

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Dr Chris Lehnert is a Robotics Lecturer within the Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) discipline at QUT. His research interests lie in the development of novel methods for robotic manipulation in real world and challenging environments. A particular focus of his research has been on enabling robots to perform autonomous harvesting operations in horticulture. He led a small team of PhD students, post-doctoral fellows and engineers in developing new robotic technologies for horticulture through the Strategic Investment in Farm Robotics (SIFR) program at QUT.

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Luis Mejias Alvarez

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Luis Mejias is an Associate Professor and Mechatronics study area coordinator at QUT and was the Deputy Director of the QUT Australian Research Centre for Aerospace Automation (ARCAA). He has a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering, a Master of Telecommunication, a PhD in Robotics and Automation and a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education.

He specialises in unmanned aerial systems covering many aspects related to this field such as navigation, control theory, path planning, image processing and vision-based control amongst others. His research is related to the development of automation technologies that enable unmanned aircraft to perform tasks with minimal user supervision. he is particularly motivated by the development of enabling technologies that allow seamless usage of unmanned aircraft in society.

He is currently investigating machine learning approaches for automatic analysis of drone imagery,  and design, modelling and control of tilting rotors.

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Miaomiao Liu

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Dr Miaomiao Liu is a Lecturer and an ARC DECRA Fellow in the College of Engineering and Computer Science at ANU. She was a Research Scientist at Data61/CSIRO from 2016-2018. Prior to that she was a postdoctoral research fellow and researcher in NICTA. She received her PhD degree in November 2012 from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include 3D vision, 3D reconstruction and 3D Scene Modeling and Understanding, and Understanding Human Pose and Body in 3D. She joined the Centre as an Associate Investigator in July 2018.

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Thierry Peynot

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Thierry is an Associate Professor in Robotics and Autonomous Systems and Mining3 Chair in Mining Robotics at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT).  He is also Program Director (Automation) for Mining3. Between December 2007 and February 2014 he was a Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), The University of Sydney. He received his PhD degree from the University of Toulouse (INPT), France, in 2006, with a thesis prepared at LAAS-CNRS. From 2005 to 2007 he was also an Associate Lecturer at the University of Toulouse. In 2005 he visited the NASA Ames Research Centre in California. Thierry is Associate Editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and has served regularly as an Associate Editor of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) and the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). He was the Local Arrangement Chair for ICRA 2018 in Brisbane.

His current research interests focus on mobile robotics and autonomous systems in challenging environments, and include: resilient perception, multimodal sensing, sensor data fusion, robotic vision, mapping and localisation, and terrain traversability estimation for unmanned ground vehicles. Thierry was a Research Affiliate with the Centre before joining as an Associate Investigator in May 2018.

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Qinfeng ‘Javen’ Shi

University of Adelaide, Australia

Professor Javen Qinfeng Shi is the national lead of Smarter Regions Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) bid, founding director of Probabilistic Graphical Model group, director in advanced reasoning and learning of Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) at the University of Adelaide. He is the first ARC discovery early career researcher award (DECRA) awardee in machine learning (2012-2014).

One of his very recent achievements is that he formed the team DeepSightX recently won 2nd place in a global competition to predict mineral deposits in June 2019. One thousand people from 62 countries had entered. In merely 3 months, his team outperforms professional companies with over 40 years experience in mining.

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David Suter

University of Adelaide, Australia

David holds a BSc (Applied Maths and Physics) and Diploma of Education, from The Flinders University of SA; Grad. Diploma Computing from RMIT; and a PhD in Computer Science from La Trobe University.

His appointments include Lecturer (1988-1991) at La Trobe University Dept. of Computer Science and Computer Engineering; Senior Lecturer (1992-2000), Associate Professor (2001-2005), and Professor (2006-2008) at Monash University Dept. Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering; Professor (2008-) at The University of Adelaide School of Computer Science. He also was a member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts (2008-2010).

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Jochen Trumpf

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Jochen Trumpf received the Dipl.-Math. and Dr. rer. nat. degrees in mathematics from the University of Wuerzburg, Germany, in 1997 and 2003, respectively. He is currently the Director of the Software Innovation Institute at the Australian National University.

His research interests include observer theory and design, linear systems theory and optimisation on manifolds with applications in robotics, computer vision and wireless communication.

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Qi Wu

University of Adelaide, Australia

Dr Qi Wu is a Senior Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at the University of Adelaide and he is the ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellow between 2019-2021. He was awarded a J G Russell Award by Australian Academy of Science. He joined the Centre firstly as a Research Fellow before becoming an Associate Investigator in 2018. He obtained his PhD degree in 2015 and MSc degree in 2011, in Computer Science from University of Bath, United Kingdom. His research interests are mainly in computer vision and machine learning. Currently, he is working on the vision-language problem and he is especially an expert in the area of image captioning and visual question answering (VQA). His attributes-based image captioning model got first place on the MS COCO Image Captioning Challenge Leader Board in October of 2015. He has published several papers in prestigious conferences and journals, such as TPAMI, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, IJCAI and AAAI.

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Liang Zheng

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Dr Liang Zheng is a Lecturer and Computer Science Futures Fellow in the Research School of Computer Science in the Australian National University. He obtained both his B.S degree (2010) and Ph.D degree (2015) from Tsinghua University. He was a postdoc researcher with the University of Technology Sydney from 2016 to 2018. He has published over 30 papers in highly selected venues such as TPAMI, IJCV, CVPR, ECCV, and ICCV. He makes effective attempts in exploring large-scale person re-identification, and his works are positively received by the community. Dr Zheng received the Outstanding PhD Thesis from Chinese Association of Artificial Intelligence and the Early Career R&D Award from D2D CRC, Australia. His research has been featured by the MIT Technical Review, and four papers are selected into the computer science courses in Stanford University and the University of Texas at Austin. He serves as an Area Chair/Senior PC/Session Chair in ICPR 2018, ICME 2019, ICMR 2019 and IJCAI 2019, and organized tutorials and workshops at ICPR 2018, ECCV 2018 and CVPR 2019.

Liang joined the Centre as an Associate Investigator in 2019.

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Partner Investigators (PIs)

Tim Barfoot

University of Toronto, Canada

Timothy D. Barfoot received the B.A.Sc. degree in engineering science from the University of Toronto in 1997 and a Ph.D. degree in aerospace science and engineering in 2002. He is a Professor with the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) in Canada where he works in the areas of guidance, navigation, and control of mobile robots in a variety of applications. Tim is interested in developing methods to allow mobile robots to operate over long periods of time in large-scale, unstructured, three-dimensional environments, using rich on board sensing (e.g., cameras and laser rangefinders) and computation.

He is on the Editorial Boards of the International Journal of Robotics Research and the Journal of Field Robotics. Tim was on sabbatical from the University from August 2017 to April 2019, and worked as Director, Autonomous Systems at Apple, Cupertino in California. He joined the Centre as a Partner Investigator in 2019.

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Francois Chaumette

French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, France

Francois Chaumette was born in Nantes, France and graduated from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique, Nantes, in 1987. Francois received the Ph.D. degree and “Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches” in Computer Science from the University of Rennes, France, in 1990 and 1998 respectively.

Since 1990, Francois has been with Inria in Rennes. His current position is Senior Research Scientist (“Directeur de Recherche”). Francois is the head of the Lagadic group, which is a common group to Inria Rennes Bretagne Atlantique and Irisa.

Francois’ research interests include visual servoing, active vision, robotics, and computer vision.

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Andrew Davison

Imperial College London, UK

Andrew holds the position of Professor of Robot Vision at the Department of Computing and leads the Robot Vision Research Group and the Dyson Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College, London.  He is working in computer vision and robotics: specifically his main area of research has concerned SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) using vision, with a particular emphasis on methods that work in real-time with commodity cameras. This is technology that can provide low-cost and robust real-time localisation and scene understanding for domestic robots, humanoid robots, wearable sensors, game interfaces or other devices.

He has a longstanding relationship with Dyson Ltd. in the UK, having worked for them as a consultant on robot vision technology since 2005. This collaboration led to the creation in 2014 of the Dyson Robotics Laboratory at Imperial College of which he is the Director and founder. (Over 9,500 citations and an h-index of 36)

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Frank Dellaert

Georgia Tech, USA

Frank is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is also affiliated with the RIM@GT center and is well known for contributions to Robotics and Computer Vision.  He attended the Catholic University of Leuven, in Belgium, from 1984 to 1989 and received a degree Electrical Engineering. He attended the Case Western Reserve University from 1993 to 1995 and received a master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering. In 1995 he began studying at Carnegie Mellon University where he worked as a Research Assistant and received his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 2001. In August of that same year, he joined the faculty of Georgia Institute of Technology.

Frank holds interests in the areas of robotics and computer vision, including Bayesian inference and Monte Carlo approximations and how to attain efficiency with approximation methods. (Over 12,500 citations and an h-index of 47).

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Seth Hutchinson

Georgia Tech, USA

Seth Hutchinson is Professor and KUKA Chair for Robotics in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also serves as Associate Director of the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. His research in robotics spans the areas of planning, sensing, and control. He has published more than 200 papers on these topics and is co-author of the books “Principles of Robot Motion: Theory, Algorithms, and Implementations,” published by MIT Press, and “Robot Modelling and Control,” published by Wiley. Seth is a Fellow of the IEEE and serves on the editorial board of the International Journal of Robotics Research and chairs the steering committee of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. He was Founding Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s Conference Editorial Board (2006-2008) and Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transaction on Robotics (2008-2013). Seth is an Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was Professor of ECE until 2018, serving as Associate Head for Undergraduate Affairs from 2001 to 2007. He received his Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1988. He joined the Centre as a Partner Investigator in 2019.

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Paul Newman

Oxbotica, UK

Paul Newman is the BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford. He is Director of the Oxford Robotics Institute (ori.ox.ac.uk) within the Department of Engineering Science. The ORI enjoys a world leading reputation in mobile autonomy, developing machines which roll, walk, poke, swim and fly in the real world. His focus lies on pushing the boundaries of navigation and autonomy techniques in terms of both endurance and scale. In 2014 he founded Oxbotica; a spinout company focused on Mobile Autonomy. He was elected fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and the IEEE with a citation for outstanding contributions to robot navigation.

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Marc Pollefeys

ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Marc will contribute to the Robust Vision and Vision and Action theme of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision and is a full professor at the Department of Computer Science of ETH Zurich. He leads the Computer Vision and Geometry lab. Marc is also director of science at Microsoft and leads a team of computer vision researchers working on mixed reality and robotics.

He obtained his PhD from the KU Leuven in Belgium. His main area of research is computer vision. One of his main research goals is to develop flexible approaches to capture visual representations of real world objects, scenes and events. Marc is General Chair of ICCV 2019 and was General Chair for ECCV 2014 and Program Chair for CVPR 2009. He is an IEEE Fellow. (Over 27,000 citations and an h-index of 85).

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Philip Torr

University of Oxford, UK

He completed his PhD at the Robotics Research Group of the University of Oxford. He left Oxford to work for six years as a research scientist for Microsoft Research, first in Redmond USA in the Vision Technology Group, then in Cambridge UK founding the vision side of the Machine learning and perception group. He is now a Professor at Oxford University. He has founded the company Oxsight and is Chief Scientific Advisor to 5AI.

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Research Fellows

Akansel Cosgun

Monash University, Australia

Akansel Cosgun is a Research Fellow with the Centre at Monash University. He holds a PhD in Robotics from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Akansel is interested in developing robotic systems that can do useful tasks in the real world. His research interests include robot manipulation, machine learning, and human-robot interaction.

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Basura Fernando

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Dr. Basura Fernando was a research fellow and a lecturer based at the Australian National University (ANU). He obtained PhD from VISICS group of KU Leuven, Belgium in March 2015. He is interested in Computer Vision and Machine Learning research. Has has contributed to highly cited work on statistical domain adaptation and human action recognition.

He left the Centre in 2018 to pursue opportunities overseas, joining the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR) as a Research Scientist in Singapore.

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Ben Harwood

Monash University, Australia

Ben completed undergraduate studies in Computer Science and Mechatronics Engineering at Monash University before commencing a PhD in Computer Systems Engineering.  Ben’s research was principally focused on efficient algorithms for processing high dimensional big data. This research has applications across a broad range of tasks from extracting information out of video streams, to finding meaningful connections between statements in a large corpus.

Ben has submitted his PhD for examination in 2018 and is now a Research Fellow with the Centre.

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Benjamin Meyer

Monash University, Australia

Ben completed his PhD in August 2019 at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision at Monash University, under the supervision of Tom Drummond. He is continuing his work at the centre as a research fellow. Ben’s research focuses primarily on deep learning, with particular interest in the problems of metric learning, novelty detection, open set recognition, active learning and generative models. He is now a Research Fellow in the Centre.

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Bohan Zhuang

University of Adelaide, Australia

Bohan joined the Centre as a Research Fellow after completing his PhD at the University of Adelaide in March 2018, supervised by Chief Investigators Chunhua Shen and Ian Reid. His research interest is in compressing and accelerating deep neural networks for resource constraint devices. And he also focuses on a wide span of applications in Computer Vision. He completed his bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering in July, 2014 at Dalian University of Technology, China. During his undergraduate study, Bohan worked with Prof. Huchuan Lu.

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Thalaiyasingam Ajanthan

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Ajanthan joined the Centre as a Research Fellow in January 2019. Prior to this, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Torr Vision Group at the University of Oxford from June 2017. Ajanthan obtained his PhD from the Australian National University in May 2017 and he was primarily supervised by Prof. Richard Hartley. During his PhD he was also a member of the Analytics group at Data61, CSIRO, Canberra. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronic and Telecommunication Engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. Ajanthan has broad interests in Graphical Models, Optimization Algorithms and Machine Learning.

He is part of the Centre’s Learning research project team.

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David Hall

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

David became a Research Fellow with the Centre in April 2108 after submitting his PhD in January 2018. He performed his PhD research at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with a focus on autonomous weed recognition systems for agricultural robotics working under Dr Feras Dayoub, Dr Chris McCool and Prof. Tristan Perez.

David’s main research focuses are on making systems which are adaptable to real-world variations and conditions. He is pleased to be working on the Centre project Robotic Vision Evaluation & Benchmarking which will address issues such as adaptable vision and continuous learning.

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Dylan Campbell

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Dylan joined the Centre as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in August 2018. Previously, he was a PhD student at ANU and Data61/CSIRO, where he worked on geometric vision problems, and a research assistant in the Cyber-Physical Systems group of Data61/CSIRO, where he worked on Resource Constrained Vision.  Dylan received a BE in Mechatronic Engineering from the University of New South Wales. He has broad research interests within computer vision and robotics, including geometric vision and human-centred vision. In particular, he has investigated geometric sensor data alignment problems, such as camera localisation, simultaneous localisation and mapping, and structure from motion.

He is currently looking at the problems of recognising, modelling, and predicting human actions, poses and human-object interactions with a view to facilitate robot-human interaction as part of a Centre project.

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Itzik Ben Shabat

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Itzik joined the Centre as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) node in July 2019. Previously, he was a Ph.D. student at Technion Israel Institute of Technology where he worked on “Classification, segmentation, and geometric analysis of 3D point clouds using deep learning” under the supervision of Prof. Anath Fischer and Michael Lindenbaum.

Itzik completed his Bsc. Cum Laude in 2008 (Mechanical Engineering, Technion) and his Msc. Summa Cum Laude in 2015 under the supervision of Prof. Anath Fischer (Mechanical Engineering, Technion). His research interests lie in the intersection of robotic perception, 3D computer vision, and geometric analysis, usually using 3D point cloud data.

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Suman Bista

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Suman Bista joined the Centre in 2017 as a Research Fellow based at QUT. He worked on visual navigation and recognition for the Pepper humanoid robot and was supervised by Centre Director, Professor Peter Corke. His research interests include Visual Navigation, Visual learning, Robotics Vision and Optimisation. In August 2019, Suman joined the Centre’s Robotic Vision Evaluation and Benchmarking Project, continuing as a Research Fellow in this role.

Suman completed his PhD titled “Indoor Navigation of Mobile Robots based on Visual Memory and Image-Based Visual Servoing” in 2016 with the Lagadic Group, INRIA Rennes Bretagne Atlantique, Rennes, France under the supervision of Dr Francois Chaumette and Dr Paolo Robuffo Giordano.

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Masoud Faraki

Monash University, Australia

Masoud Faraki was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision located at Monash University. Previously, he was a PhD candidate at the Australian National University (ANU) and at Data61 located at CSIRO, Canberra, Australia. His main research interests include machine learning and computer vision. He also holds a M.Sc. degree in artificial intelligence and a B.Sc. in computer software engineering. Masoud left the Centre in October 2019 and is now a Researcher at NEC Laboratories America, Inc. and is based in San Jose.

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Yasir Latif

University of Adelaide, Australia

Yasir Latif did his bachelors at Ghulam Ishaq Khan Institute of Engineering Science and Technology in  Topi, Pakistan and his master in Communication Engineering from Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. After that, he pursued his PhD at University of Zaraogoza, Spain under the supervision of Prof. Jose Neira. He visited Imperial College London and Massachusetts Institute of Technology for short research stays during that period. The main theme of his doctoral thesis was reliable loop closure detection and verification for the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem. His interests include SLAM, Computer Vision and looking for the ultimate question.

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Jürgen “Juxi” Leitner

Queensland University of Technology

Jürgen “Juxi” Leitner is co-founder of LYRO Robotics, a startup creating robotic systems that can pick and pack a large range of objects, thanks to a tight integration of computer vision and robotic manipulation. He is also a part-time post-doctoral research fellow at QUT leading the Manipulation and Vision project within the Centre. He works with students at the interaction of vision, robotics, and manipulation, most notable he was leading Team ACRV into victory at the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge team.

Juxi received a PhD for his work on making the iCub humanoid robot see and interact with the world at the Robotics Lab of the Dalle Molle Institute for AI (IDSIA). He previously worked on AI and robotics at the European Space Agency’s Advanced Concepts Team. His background includes a Joint European Master in Space Science and Technology (SpaceMaster) and a BSc degree in Computer Science from the Vienna University of Technology.

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Hui Li

University of Adelaide

Hui Li completed her PhD in 2018 at The University of Adelaide under the supervision of Chief Investigator Chunhua Shen and Associate Investigator Qi Wu. She received a Dean’s Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence. Hui’s research interests include visual question answering, text detection and recognition, car license plate detection and recognition, and also deep learning techniques. She became a Research Fellow with the Centre in July 2018.

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Wei Liu

University of Adelaide, Australia

Wei Liu is a postdoctoral research fellow at The University of Adelaide. He is working with Chief Investigators Ian Reid and Chunhua Shen. Wei received his B.E degree from Xi’an Jiaotong University and Ph.D. degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2012 and 2018, respectively. His research interests mainly focus on image filtering in low-level computer vision with a focus on boosting low-level computer vision with deep learning methods.

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Yonhon Ng

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Yonhon Ng joined the Centre as a research fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in January 2019. He is working on the Fast Visual Motion Control project under the supervision of Prof. Robert Mahony. He completed his PhD degree at the ANU under the supervision of Dr. Jonghyuk Kim, Prof. Brad Yu and Assoc. Prof. Hongdong Li. He also obtained his Bachelor of Engineering (R&D) at the ANU and was awarded with a University Medal.

Yonhon’s research interests include state estimation and control, 3D computer vision and robotics. He enjoys playing badminton, fishing and cooking during the weekend.

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Pulak Purkait

University of Adelaide, Australia

Pulak received a PhD in computer science from the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata, India, in 2014. He was a postdoctoral researcher with the University of Adelaide, from September 2013 to February 2016 and again from September 2018. He has spent two years (2016-2018) at Toshiba Research Europe, Cambridge UK before joining back at the University of Adelaide. His research interests include image processing, computer vision and machine learning. He joined the Centre in 2018 and is currently leading a project on 3D scene graph generation.

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Yuankai Qi

University of Adelaide, Australia

Yuankai is a postdoctoral research fellow based at The University of Adelaide. He is working with Prof. Anton van den Hengel and Dr. Qi Wu. Yuankai received his B.E, M.S, and Ph.D. degrees from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2011, 2013 and 2018 respectively.

His research is focused on computer vision tasks especially visual object tracking and instance-level video segmentation. He is currently doing research on the vision and language navigation task.

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Nicole Robinson

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Dr Nicole Robinson is a Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology, joining the Centre in 2018. She has led clinical trials and experimental studies involving the use of humanoid robots in interpersonal interactions. She has also conducted research in the healthcare field, including the translation of psychotherapeutic and healthcare programs to be delivered by a social robot. Nicole has disseminated her research and knowledge through television, radio, print articles and festival stages (Tedx, SCOPE TV, ABC Live Radio and News, Channel 7 & 9 News, IBT, MIT Technology Review, Phys.Org, Gizmodo, World Science Festival, Robotronica).

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Fatemeh Saleh

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Fatemeh joined the Centre as a Research Fellow at the Australian National University (ANU) in January 2019. Prior to that, she was a PhD student at Australian National University and Data61-CSIRO, working on weakly-supervised semantic segmentation of images and videos. Within the Centre, she is now working on the problem of video understanding and latent-variable generative models, with the focus on multiple object tracking, human motion prediction, and video activity analysis.

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Michele ‘Mike’ Sasdelli

University of Adelaide, Australia

Michele Sasdelli’s original background is in physics. He has studied and worked in five countries both in academic and industry environments. He worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Astrophysics Research Institute in Liverpool, focusing on deep learning applications. He was a research scientist at Cortexica Vision Systems, an AI company in London working on deep learning based algorithms for computer vision.

His interests lie in fundamental machine learning questions for computer vision and astrophysics. He is a science enthusiast and firmly believes in cross-feeding between different research fields. He joined the Centre in 2018 as a Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide working in learning theory for deep learning.

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Saroj Weerasekera

University of Adelaide, Australia

Saroj started as a PhD researcher at the University of Adelaide, supervised by Chief Investigator Ian Reid and Research Fellow Ravi Garg. His research interests lie at the intersection of visual 3D reconstruction, semantic scene understanding, and deep learning. His PhD research primarily explored the benefits of deep learning on top of standard geometric models for visual 3D reconstruction. He is continuing his work in 2018 as a Research Fellow based at the University of Adelaide.

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Xin Yu

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Xin Yu was a research fellow at Australian National University (ANU). He received his Ph.D degree from the Australian National University under the supervision of Prof. Richard Hartley, Fatih Porikli and Basura Fernando. He also obtained a Ph.D from Tsinghua University, China, under the supervision of Prof. Li Zhang.

Xin is now a lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney.

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Rui Zeng

Monash University

Rui Zeng joined the Centre as a research fellow at Monash University in 2019 after completing his PhD at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). At Monash, he was working on the visual odometry project under the supervision of Chief Investigator Tom Drummond.

Rui’s research interests include 3D computer vision and deep learning. He enjoys playing badminton and basketball during the weekend.

He left the Centre in March 2020 to take up a postdoctoral research associate position with the University of Sydney.

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Haoyang Zhang

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Haoyang joined the Centre as a Research Fellow in December 2018 after completing his PhD at Australian National University (ANU) and Data61, CSIRO in July 2018. During his PhD, Haoyang mainly worked with A/Prof. Xuming He on visual object detection and segmentation. His research interests include computer vision and its application to robots.

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Yan Zuo

Monash University, Australia

Yan completed his PhD titled “Advances in Decision Forests and Ferns with Applications in Deep Representation Learning for Computer Vision” in 2019 under the supervision of Chief Investigator Professor Tom Drummond. During his PhD, his research focused on a family of learning algorithms categorised as ensemble learning methods. His work involved investigating methods for incorporating decision forests and decision ferns within deep learning frameworks and applying them to computer vision. These applications include a range of tasks including image classification, image segmentation, image synthesis and video prediction. He then joined the Centre as a Research Fellow in June 2019 and his current research is focused on solving problems in machine perceptron using learning approaches such as Generative Adversarial Networks and Reinforcement Learning for navigation and mapping within the Learning project of the Centre.

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Associated Research Fellow

Ravi Garg

University of Adelaide, Australia

Ravi Garg and Associated Research Fellow with our Centre and is part of the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies at The University of Adelaide as senior research associate since April 2014. He is working with Prof. Ian Reid on his Laureate Fellowship project named “Lifelong Computer Vision Systems”. Prior to joining University of Adelaide, he finished his PhD from Queen Mary University of London under the supervision of Professor Lourdes Agapito where he worked on Dense Motion Capture of Deformable Surfaces from Monocular Video.

His current research interest lies in building learnable systems with little or no supervision which can reason about scene geometry as well as semantics. He is exploring how far the visual geometry concepts can help current deep neural network frameworks in scene understanding.

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Fan Zeng

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Fan Zeng was an Associated Research Fellow with the Centre and was based at the Queensland University of Technology. During this time, he developed a veloping low-cost visual localization systems for industrial vehicles. Prior to joining QUT, he was a lecturer in Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering, Chinese University of Hong Kong. He has worked on a downhole mining project with the Institute of Geology and Geophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has also developed novel technologies to make tactile sensor arrays for medical robots. Fan received his PhD from the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology, and holds a Bachelor of Engineering from Tsinghua University. Fan left the Centre in September 2018 to take up a new role based in Brisbane.

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Research Affiliates

Ajay Pandey

Queensland University of Technology

Ajay Pandey holds a PhD in Physics (2007) from University of Angers, France and is currently a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow within the Medical and Healthcare Robotics group in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at QUT.

His research interests include exploitation of the fundamental mechanisms such as singlet exciton fission, triplet fusion and triplet energy transfer in excitonic semiconductor heterojunctions for efficient energy conversion, photodetection, energy up-conversion and optoelectronic sensing. He is setting a new advanced organic optoelectronics research group aimed at developing smart sensors for robotics at QUT. He also serves as an Editorial Board Member of the Scientific Reports, a journal published by Springer Nature.

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Álvaro Parra

University of Adelaide

Álvaro received his BEng (2008) and MSc (2011) in Computer Science from the Universidad de Chile, and his PhD in Computer and Mathematical Sciences from the University of Adelaide in 2016. Since May 2016, he has been a Research Associate at the same university. He is interested in robust estimation and optimisation methods for geometric problems in computer vision, especially on problems involving rotations. His research interests include SLAM, structure from motion, quasi-convex optimisation, consensus set maximisation, rotation search, rotation averaging, point cloud registration, and machine learning. He joined the Centre as a Research Affiliate in 2019.

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Anjali Jaiprakash

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

She has extensive research experience in the hospital and clinical setting and the ethical conduct of research in compliance with the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (the Code). Currently, she is working as the Advance QLD Research Fellow at the Medical and Healthcare Robotics Group at the ARC Centre of Excellence for  Robotic Vision and QUT under the supervision of a Robotics Engineer, Professor Jonathan Roberts and an Orthopaedic Surgeon, Professor Ross Crawford. With a proven ability to work in a multi-disciplinary role and to understand complexities across differing scientific fields, Anjali is working towards her vision  to create a world in which robotics technology enables affordable medicine for all. 

Anjali was named a Queensland Young Tall Poppy in 2017, recognising her excellence in the field of medical robotics. She is working on the development of a vision-based robotic leg-manipulation system for knee arthroscopy and a retinal diagnostic system for the early detection of blindness.

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Anton Milan

Amazon, Berlin

Anton Milan (né Andriyenko) was a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies (ACVT) at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He received his Diploma (~MSc) degree in Computer Science from the University of Bonn, Germany in 2008 and his PhD from TU Darmstadt, Germany in 2013. He had previously worked as a software developer in the computer graphics industry. Anton serves regularly as a reviewer for various computer vision conferences and journals and organises workshops on people tracking. His research interests include semantic segmentation, human pose estimation and multiple object tracking.

Anton is now a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon, Berlin doing research in machine learning, computer vision and and robotics.

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Ben Upcroft

Oxbotica, UK

Ben was an Associate Professor at QUT and a Chief Investigator with the Centre. He left Australia in September 2016 to take up the fantastic role of Director of Projects at Oxbotica where he was particularly focussed on deploying navigation technologies on mobile robotic platforms. In September 2018, he became the VP of Technology. Ben continues his connection with the Centre as a Research Affiliate.

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Cesar Cadena

ETH Zurich

Cesar finished working with the Centre as a research fellow in December 2015. He is currently a senior researcher in the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, a partner organisation.

Cesar completed his PhD at the University of Zaragoza in 2011. His main research interest is in robotics and control. He is particularly focused on Robotic Scene Understanding, both geometry and semantics, covering Semantic Mapping, Data Association and Place Recognition tasks, Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping problems, as well as persistent mapping in dynamic environments.

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Chris McCool

University of Bonn, Germany

Dr Chris McCool received his PhD with the Speech, Audio, Image and Video Technologies (SAIVT) group, Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia in 2007. He worked for fours years as a researcher at the Idiap Research Institute developing state-of-the-art face recognition techniques capable of running on mobile phones. He subsequently joined NICTA and then QUT as a Researcher for Environmental Computer Vision problems (currently for Agricultural Robotics). He has a particular interest in fine-grained (species level) classification, biometrics, computer vision and pattern recognition.

Chris left Australia in October 2018 to take up the position of full Professor at the University of Bonn in Germany.

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Chuong Nguyen

CSIRO DATA61, Australia

Dr Chuong Nguyen was a Centre research fellow based at the Australian National University (ANU). In 2017, he left the Centre to rejoin CSIRO DATA61 as a research a scientist and continues his connection with the Centre as a Research Affiliate.

Chuong held research positions at Monash University in 2010, CSIRO CMIS in 2011 and Australian National University in 2014 after he obtained his PhD from Monash University (Australia) in 2010, MEng from Ritsumeikan University (Japan) in 2003 and BEng from Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology (Vietnam) in 2001. He was a visiting scientist at Johns Hopkins University (US) in 2004, and Microsoft Research (UK) in 2012.

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Donald Dansereau

University of Sydney, Australia

Donald Dansereau is a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney and a Research Affiliate of the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. His group develops new imaging and perception technologies to help robots see and do. Dr. Dansereau’s pioneering Master’s research in light field processing won him a Governor General’s Gold Medal at the University of Calgary in 2004. His industry work has included physics engines for video games, computer vision for microchip packaging, and chip design for automated electronics testing. In 2014 he returned to academia, completing a PhD in plenoptic signal processing at the Australian Centre for Field Robotics, University of Sydney, and joined the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision as a Research Fellow in 2014. Following a postdoctoral appointment at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab in 2016, he took up his present role.

In ongoing collaborations with ACRV researchers, Donald is exploring the joint design of optics, algorithms, and robotic embodiments. Specific applications are in low-light imaging, medical imaging, and the development of light field features for more robust robotic vision and control.

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Thanuja Dharmasiri

Sentient Vision Systems, Australia

Thanuja completed a Bachelor of Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University and graduated with First Class Honours. He started his PhD at Monash in Computer Vision and was working on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping and using Deep Learning to improve reconstruction of the world.

Thanuja graduated in 2018 and joined the Centre as a Research Fellow. He left the Centre in March 2019 to take up a position as a Deep Learning Engineer at Sentient Vision Systems in Melbourne. He became a Research Affiliate with the Centre in September 2019.

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Zongyuan Ge

Monash University, Australia

Dr. Zongyuan Ge is a full-time Senior Lecturer/Fellow employed by Monash University with specific interest and expertise in Medical AI development. He has a strong background in statistical analysis, machine learning and computer vision research. So far, he has published more than 30 peer-reviewed publications and patents, which are first/senior author. He has led or contributed to six international projects in the areas of dermatology, ophthalmology and radiology with major industry companies like IBM Watson Health, medical AI company Airdoc and medical service provider Molemap. These findings have been translated into health products and services that foster effective infectious diseases interventions in Asia-Pacific. Zongyuan was selected as one of the 200 Most Qualified Young Researchers in Computer and Mathematics by the Scientific Committee of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum Foundation in 2017.

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Sourav Garg

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Sourav obtained his Bachelors in Electronics and Communication from Thapar University, India in 2012. After graduating, he worked in the robotics research group of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for 3 years where he conducted research in the field of robotic and computer vision. In particular, he was involved in projects like: human and object tracking, product counting in a retail shop environment, and a tea-serving robot in an office environment.

Motivated to delve deeper into robotic vision, Sourav commenced his Ph.D. at QUT in 2015. His thesis title is “Robust Visual Place Recognition under Simultaneous Viewpoint and Appearance Variations”. His Ph.D. research explored ways to exploit visual semantic information, 3D geometry, and deep-learnt CNNs for visual place recognition. Sourav’s thesis was supervised by Professor Michael Milford (Principal) and Dr. Niko Suenderhauf (Associate).

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Viorela Ila

University of Sydney, Australia

Viorela Ila was a research fellow with ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision at the Australian National University (ANU). Her research interests span from low-level image processing, parallel architectures, robot vision to advanced techniques for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and 3D reconstruction based on cutting-edge computational tools such as graphical models, modern optimization methods and information theory.

Viorela left the Centre in December 2018. She has taken up the position of Senior Lecturer with the Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems, at the University of Sydney.  She continues her connection with the Centre as a research affiliate in 2019.

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Laurent Kneip

ShanghaiTech University, China

Laurent is an Assistant Professor with the School of Information Science and Technology at ShanghaiTech, in Pudong Shanghai. Prior to this, he was an Associate Investigator with the Centre and a senior researcher and lecturer at the Australian National University. He completed his PhD at ETH Zurich and continues his connection with the Centre as a Research Affiliate.

Laurent’s research interests include visual odometry/SLAM and structure from motion with single and multi-camera systems, as well as the efficient solution of the more fundamental, underlying algebraic geometry problems. He is the main author of the open-source fameworks OpenGV and polyjam.

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Vincent Lui

Sentient Vision Systems, Australia

Vincent Lui was a PhD Researcher and then Research Fellow with the Centre based at Monash University. Vincent’s research investigated the problem of camera localization. He looked at different ways of performing pose estimation and developed a few efficient and robust techniques for pose estimation in monocular visual odometry and SLAM problems.

In April 2018, Vincent left the Centre to take up the position of Software Engineer at Sentient Vision Systems in Melbourne. He became a Centre Research Affiliate in September 2019.

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Mark McDonnell

University of South Australia

A/Prof. Mark McDonnell is Principal Investigator of the Computational Learning Systems Laboratory (www.cls-lab.org) at University of South Australia. His research interests are primarily in machine learning, with a focus on computer vision and applications.

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Liao ‘Leo’ Wu

University of New South Wales

Liao Wu received his B.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Tsinghua University in 2008 and 2013, respectively. He worked as a research fellow in National University of Singapore from 2013 to 2015. He joined QUT as a vice-chancellor’s research fellow in 2016 and joined the medical and healthcare robotics group within the Centre. His interests mainly focus on medical and industrial robotics, particularly in the areas of kinematics, calibration, flexible mechanisms, Lie groups theory, and development of mechatronic systems.

Liao left QUT in December 2018 to take up the position of Lecturer in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.

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PhD Researchers

Shahnewaz Ali

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Shahnewaz Ali earned his MSc. in Computer Engineering from Politecnico Di Milano, Italy [QS RANKINGS 2015 Top 50 Universities, top 10 European universities in 6 research areas including Computer Science and Information Systems, Electrical and Electronic Engineering]  with ICE scholarship for excellent students and BSc. in Computer Engineering from American International University – Bangladesh.

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Aimee Allen

Monash University, Australia

Aimee joined the Centre in 2019 as a PhD researcher at Monash University, working under the supervision of Professor Tom Drummond. Her previous studies were in Mechatronics and Commerce. She has spent 10 years working across diverse industries including: software development; data analysis; IT architecture, security and hardware; IT education/training; and research support. Aimee’s research interests include: HRI; theory of mind; AGI; biomimicry; and how robotic vision can provide key sensory input into these domains. Outside of research, Aimee enjoys: playing geeky games; craft/maker activities; latin dancing; and reading technical books.

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Gil Avraham

Monash University, Australia

Gil Avraham grew up in Israel and studied his Bachelor’s & Master’s in Electrical Engineering while serving at a technological unit in the Israel defense force throughout 2002-2012.

In 2013 he joined RTC-Vision, a company which specializes in providing computer vision solutions, there he worked as a computer vision engineer. In 2017 started his PhD at Monash University.

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Artur Banach

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Artur completed his Masters of Research in Medical Robotics and Image Guided Intervention at the Hamlyn Centre, Imperial College London in 2017, where he introduced Active Constraints for Tool-Shaft Collision Avoidance in Minimally Invasive Surgery on the Da Vinci Surgical System.

He is currently pursuing his PhD in Surgical Robotics at QUT, joining the Centre in late 2018. His interest covers innovating the field of surgery by looking for solutions to sublimely reduce patient suffering and improve quality of life. More precisely, he is investigating the challenges of robotic-assisted and image guided intervention in order to increase safety of minimally invasive procedures.

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Ming Cai

University of Adelaide, Australia

I am currently a PhD researcher supervised by Professor Ian Reid and Professor Chunhua Shen, with the focus on using deep learning for computer vision, especially, vision-based geometry tasks, such as 6D pose estimation for a camera and/or objects in the instance-level (or category-level).

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Shin Fang Ch’ng

University of Adelaide, Australia

Shin joined the Centre as a PhD researcher in 2017 under the supervision of Tat-Jun Chin and Alireza Khosravian. She graduated from Sheffield Hallam University UK with first class honours in Electronics Engineering in 2012. Shin’s research interest lies in computer vision and its application.

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Ziang Cheng

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Ziang received his bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harbin Institute of Technology in 2016. In 2017, he began his research at Australian National University under the co-supervision of Dr. Shaodi You, Dr. Viorela Ila and Prof. Hongdong Li. He later joined the Centre in 2018 and is working on applying deep learning techniques to lower level computer vision tasks. His research interests are computer vision, graphical models and deep learning.

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Arif Chowdhury

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Arif completed his M.Sc. Engineering (Electrical) in September 2014 from Rajshahi University of Engineering & Technology (RUET), Bangladesh. In 2015, he joined RUET as Assistant Professor in the department of Electronics & Telecommunication Engineering. Currently, he is doing his PhD research in robotic vision under the supervision of Richard Hartley and Chuong Nguyen at ANU. He is working on polarization based structure computation for robotic vision. His research interests are image processing, deep learning and 3D reconstruction.

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Tom Coppin

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Tom graduated from ANU in 2017 with first class honours in a Bachelor of Engineering. He then worked as a research assistant at QUT for Dr. Anjali Jaiprakash on the Retinal Plenoptoscope project, where he helped to design and build a light field camera for imaging a human retina. His PhD involves using the Raven-II surgical robotic platform to perform eye surgery and is supervised by Prof. Jonathan Roberts, Dr. Anjali Jaiprakash, and Prof. Peter Corke. He joined the Centre in 2018.

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Emily Corser

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Emily graduated from QUT in 2017 with first class honours in a Bachelor of Mechatronic Engineering. During her degree, Emily worked with Centre Chief Investigator Professor Matthew Dunbabin on a surf rescue robot, and at CSIRO on a nitrate sensing project. Emily started her PhD in 2018 under the supervision of Chief Investigators Matthew Dunbabin, Feras Dayoub, Jonathan Roberts, and external CSIRO researcher Dr. Emili Hernandez. Her interests surround underwater robotics, particularly from a deep learning perspective.

At the end of 2019, Emily left QUT to join Built Robotics as a Field Robotics Engineer.

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Vibhavari Dasagi

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Vibha completed her Bachelor degree in Mechatronics Engineering from Monash University (Malaysian campus) before completing her Masters in Robotics at the University of Pennsylvania. While at UPenn, she was part of the team who competed in RoboCup 2013 and won the Humanoid League. She joined the Centre in 2019 and is completing her PhD in Artificial Curiosity supervised by Research Fellow Juxi Leitner and Associate Investigator Thierry Peynot.

Vibha is highly interested in understanding how the human brain works and emulating it in artificial agents, and believes curious agents are a step towards achieving it.

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Luke Ditria

Monash University, Australia

Luke graduated with a bachelor of electrical and computer systems engineering (honors) from Monash uni Clayton. He then worked in engineering consulting before coming back to Monash to start his PhD in 2018. Luke is interested in deep reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation. In his free time, he enjoys hobby electronics and is involved in the maker community.

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Mahsa Ehsanpour

University of Adelaide

Mahsa joined the Centre as a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Adelaide in Oct. 2018 under the supervision of Prof. Ian Reid and Dr. Javen Shi. Prior to this, she received her M.Sc. in Computer Networks from Sharif University of Technology and her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from K. N. Toosi University of Technology in Iran. Her main research interests lie in the area of computer vision and deep learning paradigms with a specific focus on human action recognition.

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Jordan Erskine

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Jordan graduated from QUT in 2017 with first class honours in a Bachelor of Mechatronic Engineering. While there, he worked with QUT’s team for the Amazon Picking Challenge, as well as working on a CSIRO project involving developing autonomous surveying with UAVs. He started his PhD in 2018 and is supervised by Centre Research Affiliate and QUT Research Fellow Chris Lehnert, Research Fellow Juxi Leitner and Centre Director Peter Corke. His field of study involves developing and improving generalisable robotic manipulation skills.

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Rafael Felix Alves

University of Adelaide, Australia

Rafael joined the Centre  as a Ph.D. candidate mid-year in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Gustavo Carneiro and co-supervision of Prof. Ian Reid at The University of Adelaide.  His research project aims to bring contributions to the fields of zero-shot learning using generative models.  Rafael received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from the Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie (Brazil – 2015), and B.Sc. on Information Systems, Universidade Estadual de Montes Claros (Brazil – 2011).

His research interests include deep learning, zero-shot learning, open-set recognition, generative models, uncertainty, and optimization.

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Luis Guerra Fernandez

Monash University, Australia

Luis Guerra completed a Bachelor of Electronics Engineering (2013) and a Masters of Science in Digital Signal Processing (2015) in Chihuahua, Mexico. During his undergraduate studies, he completed an internship at the Advanced Materials Research Center where he won a national research contest. Afterwards he entered the automotive industry as an embedded software developer for a year and then held a research position as Computer Vision Engineer in ADAS for another year. Luis started his PhD with the Centre at Monash University at the end of 2017. His research interests are focused on efficient heterogeneous deep learning implementations for embedded systems and constrained devices. He is supervised by Chief Investigator Professor Tom Drummond.

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Jian “Edison” Guo

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Edison Guo was a PhD researcher in computer vision and machine learning at The Australian National University (ANU), specifically focusing on applying deep learning methods to visual object recognition and scene understanding. In addition to his PhD work, Edison also has great interest in big data technologies such as Hadoop ecosystem as well as data science contests.In his free time, Edison enjoys playing table tennis and badminton. He left the Centre in 2019 and is still employed at ANU.

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Jesse Haviland

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Jesse graduated from QUT in 2018 with First Class Honours in a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering. He was welcomed to the world of research by his supervisor, Peter Corke when he completed his honours project, and a Vacation Research Experience Scheme (VRES) on the project “Interactive Voice Interface for Robotic Manipulation Demonstrator” in 2018/2019. Jesse currently pursuing his PhD with the Centre supervised by Peter Corke. His research is concerned with mobile manipulation and how vision based mobile platforms can achieve useful outcomes in unstructured environments.

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Gus Hebblewhite

Monash University, Australia

Gus completed his Bachelors degree in electrical engineering and arts (philosophy) at Monash University in 2015. He spent a few years alternately working, travelling and studying economics before returning to Monash in 2018 to start his PhD in robotic vision with Chief Investigator Professor Tom Drummond. His research aspires to better understand how we can represent and model useful concepts like physics, objects, relations, and causality, which he anticipates might help lift the binding constraint in a number of robotics and vision domains.

In his free time Gus enjoys scuba diving, reading, cycling, and talking about social science.

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Mina Henein

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Mina joined the Australian National University and the Australian Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision in March 2016 as a PhD candidate to work on SLAM in dynamic environments. He is doing research under the supervision of Viorela Ila and Robert Mahony. His research interests include graph-based SLAM, dynamic SLAM and object SLAM besides kinematics and optimization techniques.

Mina received a B.Sc. in Engineering and Materials Science with Honours majoring in Mechatronics from the German University in Cairo (GUC), Egypt in 2012. He then worked in the business sector for a multinational FMCG for one year as a Near-East demand manager before pursuing his masters in Advanced Robotics. He received a double M.Sc. degree; European Masters of Advanced Robotics (EMARo) from Universita degli Studi di Genova, Italy and Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France. T

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Yicong Hong

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Yicong completed his Bachelor of Engineering at the Australian National University in 2018, majoring in Mechatronic Systems. He was a research student at Data61/CSIRO from 2017 to 2018 working on his honours project about human shape and pose estimation. Yicong joined the Centre as a PhD researcher in 2019 under the supervision of Chief Investigator Professor Stephen Gould. His research insterests include visual grounding and textual grounding problems and he is currently working in the Centre’s Vision and Language research project.

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William Hooper

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

William Hooper graduated from QUT in 2017 with First Class Honours in Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Bachelor of Mathematics. During his degree he completed a Vacation Research position, learning how to build 3D realistic household interiors and modifying them to allow appropriate use in robotics applications. William is currently pursuing a PhD in the Centre, with a research focus on bringing his interest in mathematics and statistics to real-world robotics applications. His current research interests include; probabilistic generative models, causal reasoning and algorithmic complexity.

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Natalie Jablonsky

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Natalie completed her Bachelor of Information Technology, majoring in Computer Science, from Deakin University in 2017. She started her PhD with the Centre at QUT under the supervision of Niko Sünderhauf and Michael Milford. Natalie’s research focused on modelling spatial relationships for semantic SLAM.

In 2019, Natalie left QUT to start in the role of Principal Data and Plaforms Engineer (Enterprise Data) at BHP in Brisbane.

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Chris Jeffrey

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Chris comes from a diverse background, with qualifications  in electronics, medicine and business. Initially undertaking an undergraduate degree in Electrical and Computer engineering gaining industry employment midway through the course and further going on to graduate with honours and the J.H. Curtis award from Engineering Australia for thesis of the year.

On graduation Chris went on to work as a commissioned officer in the Australian Army and in 2008 Chris was awarded the Army Capability Development award for work in developing an AI based software package to facilitate rapid deployment.  In 2009 was deployed on operation Slipper and awarded the Australian Active Service Medal and the Operations Slipper Medal for his efforts.

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Samira Kaviani

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Samira started her PhD at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2018 and is supervised by Chief Investigators Richard Hartley and Stephen Gould. Her current research focuses on human pose estimation and anticipation.

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Gerard Kennedy

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Gerard completed his Bachelor of Engineering and Science at the Australian National University in 2018, majoring in mechatronic systems and applied mathematics. In 2017 he began work as a research assistant for the ANU node of the Centre, working on the perception system of a robotic harvesting platform. For this work he has looked into calibration, image segmentation and 3D reconstruction problems in real-time, on-farm environments.

Gerard started his PhD in robotic vision under the supervision of Chief Investigator Robert Mahony at the ANU in 2019. His PhD topic will involve investigating the use of occlusion information to enhance object reconstruction and segmentation in detailed, cluttered environments. The application of the project will remain the perception system of the robotic harvesting platform.

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Robert Lee

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Robert graduated from QUT in 2017 with first class honours in a Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering. During his degree he worked with the Centre on the LunaRoo hopping lunar payload robot, as well as a CSIRO collaboration project involving evolving spiking neural networks for quadrotor control. Robert started his PhD in 2018 and is supervised by Research Fellow Juxi Leitner, Research Fellow Valerio Ortenzi and Centre Director Peter Corke. His interests lie in deep reinforcement learning, control and vision, and he is currently working on applying these tools to improve robotic grasping.

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Kejie ‘Nic’ Li

University of Adelaide, Australia

Kejie graduated from ANU with a Bachelor of Advanced Computing (Honours) with first class honours in 2016. During this time, he mainly worked on single view depth estimation. He joined the Centre in 2017 to work on semantic scene understanding, and the intriguing yet challenging task of building robots that are able to better interact with the world by well understanding the concept of objects and environment.

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Liu Liu

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Liu Liu joined the Centre as a PhD researcher in the Australian National University (ANU) in 2018, working under the supervision of Hongdong Li. He obtained his bachelor degree from the Northwestern Polytechnical University (Honor School). He is mainly working on large-scale place recognition and image-based localisation.

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Yu Liu

University of Adelaide, Australia

Yu started his PhD at the University of Adelaide in 2017. His research focuses mainly on computer vision and deep learning. Before joining the Centre, Yu was a Masters student in State Key Lab of CAD&CG, Zhejiang University working in video depth recovery, segmentation and 3D reconstruction. He completed his Bachelor Degree in Software Enginnering at Southwest University.

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Zheyuan ‘David’ Liu

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

David graduated from the Australian National University in 2018 with first class honours in Bachelor of Engineering (Research and Development), majoring in Electronics and Communication Systems and minoring in Mechatronics Systems. David joined the Centre in 2019 as a PhD student at ANU under the supervision of Chief Investigator Professor Stephen Gould. His research interests surround vision and language tasks in the field of Deep Learning, particularly visual grounding and reasoning.

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Rongkai Ma

Monash University, Australia

Rongkai joined the Centre in 2019 as a PhD researcher at Monash University under the supervision of Chief Investigator Prof. Tom Drummond. In 2018, he received his bachelor degree (First Class Honours) in engineering from Monash and has a bachelor of Engineering from Central South University in Changsha, China. Rongkai is primarily interested in Deep Learning and its application in computer vision and robotics.

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Medhani Menikdiwela

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

I’m doing my research under the supervison of Hondong Li and Chuong Nguyen. My research interest are Deeplearning, computer vision, Robotics and control systems. I did Bachelor of science and technology specialized in Mechatronics, Uva Wellassa University,Sri Lanka(2012). And followed master of science in robotics and control system at University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka(2014). I have several conference publications relevant to haptic and vibration suppression of bilateral control systems.  I’m currently working on object classification and detection by using deeplearning.

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Dimity Miller

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Dimity joined the Centre in 2018 after graduating from QUT in 2017 with First Class Honours in a Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering. Dimity is currently completing her PhD on how to obtain uncertainty and robustness in deep learning for robotic vision. She is particularly interested in the reliability of deep learning in open-set conditions, where object classes that were not present in the training data are encountered.

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Douglas Morrison

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Doug is a PhD researcher QUT, supervised by Dr Juxi Leitner and Professor Peter Corke. His research is developing new strategies for robotic grasping in the unstructured and dynamic environments of the real world, that is, strategies which are general, reactive and knowledgeable about their environments. The goal: create robots that can grasp objects anywhere, all the time. Doug was also the lead developer of Cartman, the ACRV’s winning entry into the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge!

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Serena Mou

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Serena started her PhD with the Centre in 2018 after being introduced to research by her supervisor, Centre CI Dr. Niko Sünderhauf, when she completed a Vacation Research Experience Scheme (VRES) project in 2016/2017. This led to an Honours project supervised by Dr. Sünderhauf “Learning to Navigate with Reinforcement Learning”. Along with her interests in robotics, she also has a passion toward the protection and conservation of the environment. Surveying is important for understanding and protecting ecosystems but is repetitive, time consuming and expensive. By using her knowledge of deep learning and its associated frameworks, robotic task design, and semantic representation she is focusing on efficient detection of flora and fauna from aerial surveillance.

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James Mount

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

James Mount holds an Honours Degree in Mechatronics Engineering and is a current Robotics PhD Candidate at the Queensland University of Technology. His research on vision-based localisation is applicable to several domains, including self-driving vehicles. Improving education through the use of robotics is an additional interest of his.

He has also built several robots throughout his career, some for his studies, others just for enjoyment. These robots include line followers, soccer bots, automated RC cars with vision systems, as well as other various smaller projects including timing gates. He also successfully ran a KickStarter Campaign that delivered educational robots at the end of 2016.

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Vladimir Nekrasov

University of Adelaide, Australia

Vladimir joined the Centre as a PhD researcher in 2017. His thesis title is “Per-pixel image classification” supervised by Prof. Ian Reid and Prof. Chunhua Shen.

He received his specialist degree (BS and MS combined degree in Russia) in Mechanics and Applied Mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia in 2015. After that, he worked as a researcher on deep learning and started his PhD in computer science at UNIST, South Korea until March 2017 before moving to Australia.

Vladimir’s current research interests lie in deep learning: in particular, in its applications aimed to tackle computer vision tasks, such as dense per-pixel image classification, and its theoretical understanding.

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Lachlan Nicholson

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Lachlan graduated from QUT in 2016 with First Class Honours in a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering. Whilst completing his degree, he was appointed by the Centre to continue the mechanical and software upgrade of the SummitXL mobile robot as a summer research task. He also worked with the ACRV to complete his undergraduate thesis with a focus on Navigation, Object Detection, and Mobile Manipulation within an office environment. With a team from the Centre of Excellence he competed in the Amazon Picking Challenge of 2016, achieving 6th place in the final demonstration held in Leipzig, Germany. Lachlan is currently pursuing his PhD with the centre and his research is focused on Scene Understanding via Deep Learning, Semantics and SLAM.

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Sean O’Brien

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Sean joined the centre in 2016 under the supervision of Jochen Trumpf, Rob Mahony, and Viorela Ila. He received his Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) in mechatronics and Bachelor of Science in mathematics at ANU in 2015. Presently, Sean is looking at applying the theory of infinite-dimensional observers to various dense sensing modalities, including light-field cameras. He has hopes that new, efficient algorithms will emerge from his research that will assist in certain robotic vision applications such as real-time depth mapping and odometry estimation.

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Liyuan Pan

Australian National University

Liyuan Pan is a PhD researcher in Australian National University, working under the supervision of Richard Hartley, Hongdong Li, Miaomiao Liu and Yuchao Dai. She is currently working on image deblurring, flow estimation, and high-speed image reconstruction with event cameras. She joined the Centre as PhD Researcher in 2018.

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Amir Rahimi

Australian National University

Amir joined the Centre as PhD researcher at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2018. He is working under the supervision of Chief Investigators Richard Hartley and Stephen Gould. He has a B.Sc. degree in Software Engineering, and a M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence both from University of Tehran, Iran. Throughout his career, he carried out an internship as a research assistant at Technical University of Dresden under the supervision of Prof. Carsten Rother and Dr. Bogdan Savchynskyy. His research interests are object detection, probabilistic graphical models and deep learning in general.

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Maruf Rahman

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Maruf completed his bachelor’s and master’s degree from Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2012 and 2014 respectively. During his master’s degree, he started working in software industry and has gained five years of industry experience before starting his PhD with our centre in 2018. He is interested in the application of deep learning in robotic vision and is supervised by Research Fellow Dr Feras Dayoub and Centre Director Prof. Peter Corke. His research topic is to apply unsupervised machine learning in a mobile robot to detect novel objects.

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Krishan Rana

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Krishan graduated with first class honours in a Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering in 2018 and began his PhD with the Centre under the supervision of Dr Niko Suenderhauf and Prof Michael Milford soon after. His research is particularly focused on fusing classical control and deep reinforcement learning strategies for mobile robot navigation. He is additionally interested in methods which can allow policies trained in simulation to robustly transfer to real world scenarios.

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Andrew Razjigaev

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Andrew is a PhD Researcher in the Medical Robotics Group. He graduated as a Mechatronics Engineer at the Queensland University of Technology in 2017. He has been part of the Medical Robotics group since 2016 when he did a project on teleoperating a snake robot through hand gestures. Andrew also completed his capstone project on visual servoing when he was part of the Centre’s Amazon Robotics Challenge team.

Andrew’s interests include robot arm kinematics with robotic vision. His PhD project is all about developing multiple continuum robots for vision-based teleoperated minimally invasive surgery.

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Cristian Rodriguez Opazo

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Cristian joined the Centre as PhD researcher under the supervision of Chief Investigator Hongdong Li and Research Fellow Basura Fernando. His research interests are machine learning and pattern recognition focus on the tasks of object detection, scene understanding and occlusion handling. Cristian completed a Bachelor and Computer Engineering degree at Metropolitan Technological University UTEM in Chile, before moving to Australia to complete a Master of Computing (Advanced) with a specialisation in artificial intelligence at the Australian National University, with a Chilean scholarship ‘Becas Chile’. Before Crisitan joined ANU, he also worked as a research assistant and developer in the Web Intelligence Centre in Chile.

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Cedric Scheerlinck

Australian National University

Cedric completed his Master of Engineering (Mechanical) at the University of Melbourne in 2016. In 2015 he worked as a research assistant in the Fluid Dynamics lab at Melbourne before completing an exchange semester at ETH Zurich. His final year Masters thesis was a combined project with the University of Melbourne and The Northern Hospital, performing computational fluid dynamics studies on patient-specific coronary arteries.

In 2017 Cedric commenced his PhD in robotic vision under the supervision of Chief Investigator Rob Mahony at ANU. His PhD topic is high speed image reconstruction and deep learning with event cameras.

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Violetta Shevchenko

University of Adelaide

Violetta joined the Centre as a PhD researcher in 2018. She received her Bachelor Degree in Computer Science at Southern Federal University, Russia, in 2015. After that, Violetta participated in a Double Degree program with Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland, where she finished her Masters in Computational Engineering in 2017. Her research interests lie in computer vision and deep learning and, in particular, in solving the task of visual question answering.

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Yujiao Shi

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Yujiao Shi is currently a Ph.D student at the College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University. She received her B.E. degree and M.E. degree in Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing, China, in 2014 and 2017 respectively. Her research interests include spherical scene understanding, depth recovery and ground-to-aerial localization.

Yujiao joined the Centre in September 2018.

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John Skinner

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

John has a background in Web development and Video Game development. He holds a Bachelor of Software Engineering from the University of Queensland and has 3 years’ experience working in industry. He has returned to academia to investigate the potential applications of High-Fidelity simulation to computer vision. His thesis title is “High-fidelity Simulation for Robot Vision”.

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Timo Stoffregen

Monash University, Australia

Timo started his PhD at Monash University in 2017, exploring new methods and algorithms to make use of the highly temporally resolved data produced by neuromorphic camera sensors with the aim of hardware accelerating these for use in real time applications. His work aims to improve on the RV2 Centre research project by exploring the use of novel visual sensors. Prior to his work at Monash, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Bremen, Germany and worked at the German Research Centre for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), as well as taking a two year break to travel through South America and Europe. In his spare time, Timo is a keen hiker and likes to spend as much time as he can outdoors and is a volunteer with Bush Search and Rescue.

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Libo Sun

University of Adelaide, Australia

Libo joined the Centre as a PhD researcher in 2019 at the University of Adelaide, under the supervision of Professor Chunhua Shen. Before this he worked as a project officer and research associate at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His current research interests are mainly in the field of robotics, computer vision, and deep learning. In his free time, Libo enjoys hiking and travelling and has visited many places of interest including the Terracotta Warriors, The Great Wall of China, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

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Brendan Tidd

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Brendan graduated from QUT in 2017 with a Bachelor of Engineering majoring in Mechatronics, achieving first class honors. In 2016 Brendan developed a tethered underwater vessel as part of QUT’s entry to the Robotx Maritime challenge and travelled with the team to Hawaii. TeamQUT competed against 13 universities from around the world, and took out second place.

Brendan joined the Centre in late 2017 under supervision of Dr Juxi Leitner and Distinguished Professor Peter Corke, with Dr Nicholas Hudson from Data61 at CSIRO joining his supervisory team in 2018. Brendan’s work uses visual perception with reinforcement learning to control dynamic legged robots in challenging environments. This topic lead him to work with CSIRO as part of a team funded by DARPA in their latest robotics competition, a subterranean challenge, where a team of robots (including tracked, legged and flying robots) commanded by a single operator must enter an underground scenario and localise target artefacts.

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Dorian Tsai

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Dorian received his Bachelor’s of Applied Science in Engineering Science from University of Toronto, Canada, and a double Masters of Science in Space Science & Technology from Lulea Technical University, Sweden, and in Robotics & Automation from Aalto University, Finland through the Erasmus Mundus SpaceMaster program. He completed his Master’s thesis project at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab on autonomous vision-based tether-assisted rover docking. During his PhD under the supervision of Peter Corke, Donald Dansereau and Thierry Peynot, Dorian investigated how to develop 4D light field features and how to exploit them for camera motion and vision-based control for robots.

Dorian submitted his PhD for examination in 2019 and is now a Robotics Research Fellow with the Institute for Future Environments (IFE) Intellisensing group at QUT. He is particularly interested in aspects of robotic vision, and space systems.

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Pieter van Goor

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Peter completed his Bachelor of Engineer (Reseach & Development) (Honours) and Bachelor of Science at ANU in 2018, majoring in Mechatronics and Mathematics respectively. In 2017 he worked as a student intern at Data61 at CSIRO in Brisbane. His engineering honours thesis, which he completed in 2017, looked at non-linear multi-agent system control theory using unit quaternions.

In October 2018 Peter commenced his PhD in non-linear observer theory under the supervision of Rob Mahony at the ANU. He is researching fast geometric observers for non-linear control problems, such as SLAM, with a focus on fast and computationally inexpensive implementations on mobile robots. In this research, he is also looking at novel hardware options for implementing these systems.

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Yunyan Xing

Monash University

Yunyan completed her Bachelor of Electrical and Computer System Enginnering degree at Monash University in 2017, graduating with first class honours. She started her PhD at Monash University in 2018 and is supervised by Prof. Tom Drummond. Her current research focuses on utilising deep reinforcement learning to improve video prediction.

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Mingda Xu

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Ming received his B. Comm (Hons) at the University of Melbourne and worked as an actuarial analyst for 3 years before returning to academia. He completed his M. Sc. in Mathematics at the University of New South Wales, performing research in Bayesian computation and is now completing his PhD at QUT under the supervision of Prof. Michael Milford and Dr Niko Sünderhauf.

Ming is interested in applying the recent advances in scalable Bayesian computation to build loop closure systems in vision-based SLAM systems that are robust to noise and various levels of appearance changes. He joined the Centre in 2019.

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Huangying Zhan

University of Adelaide, Australia

Huangying is currently a Ph.D. Student at the University of Adelaide and affiliated with the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision. He is advised by Prof. Ian Reid and Prof. Gustavo Carneiro. His research interests include deep learning and its application in robotic vision. Previously, Huangying received his B.Eng degree in Electronic Engineering (first class honors) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he was advised by Prof. Xiaogang Wang. Also, Huangying was a visiting student in the Unmanned Systems Research Group at The National University of Singapore, where he worked with Prof. Ben M. Chen.

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Frederic ‘Zhen’ Zhang

Australian National University

Fred is a PhD student at the Australian National University under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Gould. In 2018, he received his bachelor degree in engineering from the Australian National University and bachelor of science from Beijing Institute of Technology.

Fred has been working on the task of Human-Object Interaction (HOI) Detection, and is generally interested in vision-based problems and its deep learning solutions.

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Hongguang Zhang

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Hongguang Zhang is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University. He is supervised by Dr. Piotr Koniusz and Prof. Hongdong Li. Hongguang received his B.Eng degree from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2014. His research interests include deep learning, transfer learning (zero-shot and few-shot learning), self-supervised learning, action recognition, image and video deblurring.

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Jun Zhang

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Jun received his Masters of Engineering and Bachelor of Engineering degrees in the School of Aeronautics of Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. During his Masters degree, Jun spent one and half years at the Institute of Computer Science and Technology, Peking University as a visiting researcher. His research interests include non-static visual SLAM, 3D shape analysis and retrieval and deep learning.

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Yiran Zhong

Australian National University

Yiran Zhong received the M.Eng in information and electronics engineering in 2014 with the first class honor from The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. After two years of a research assistant, he becomes a PhD student in the College of Engineering and Computer Science, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, Data61, CSIRO, Australia and ACRV Australia. He won the ICIP best Student Paper Award in 2014. His current research interests include geometric computer vision, machine learning, and deep learning.

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Alan Tianyu Zhu

Monash University, Australia

Alan completed a double degree in 2017 with a Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Science at Monash University, graduating with first class honours. He is currently supervised by Chief Investigator Tom Drummond in the field of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence. His current research goal is to investigate how to use the advantage of attention mechanism and distance metric to improve the performance of metric learning applications.

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Zheyu Zhuang

Australian National University

Zheyu Zhuang joined the Centre in 2017. His thesis topic is “Learning Robust Hand-eye Coordination for Grasping in Novel Environments” and his research is aligned with the Vision & Action Research Program and VA1 Project, supervised by Rob Mahony, Juxi Leitner, Nick Barnes and Richard Hartley.

Zheyu graduated from the Australian National University with first class honours, majoring in Electronics Engineering and Mechatronics. His research interests are visual servoing, control, machine learning and deep learning. He is working on the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge with researchers from QUT and Adelaide.

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Associated PhD Researchers

Sadegh Aliakbarian

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Sadegh is an Associated PhD researcher at our Australian National University node and a researcher at Smart Vision Systems, Data61, CSIRO. He is working on vision-based action anticipation. His method for action anticipation is particularly crucial in scenarios where one needs to react before the action is finalised, such as to avoid hitting pedestrians with an autonomous car. Currently, he is working on action anticipation in driving scenarios to predict human centric actions (e.g., driver maneuver, violating traffic rules, front car intention, pedestrian intention, and accidents with cars and pedestrians) before they actually begin to happen. Prior to starting his PhD, he was a researcher at NICTA. Before joining NICTA, Sadegh worked in the Computer Vision industry for more than two years. He also has a Bachelor of Science with honors in Computer Software Engineering.

Sadegh is also interested in other computer vision applications such as weakly-supervised semantic segmentation, usage of synthetic data in computer vision, and sequence learning.

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Jiawang Bian

University of Adelaide, Australia

Jiawang is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Adelaide and an Associated PhD researcher with the Centre. He is advised by Prof. Ian Reid and Prof. Chunhua Shen. His research interests lie in the field of computer vision, machine learning, and robotics. Jiawang received his B.Eng degree from Nankai University, where he was advised by Prof. Ming-Ming Cheng. He was a research assistant at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), where he worked with Prof. Sai-Kit Yeung. Jiawang also worked as a trainee research engineer at the Advanced Digital Sciences Center in Singapore (ADSC), Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd, and Tusimple.

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Kartik Gupta

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Kartik joined the Centre as an associated PhD researcher at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2018. He is currently working on object pose estimation and few-shot learning. Before joining ANU, Kartik worked in the computer vision industry for around 1.5 years. Kartik completed his MS (by Research) degree in computer science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mandi in 2017, working mainly in the area of computer vision.  He also worked with Prof. Darius Burschka as a DAAD research scholar at Technical University of Munich (TU Munich) during his Masters. In 2018, he began his research at Australian National University and Data61 CSIRO under the supervision of Prof. Richard Hartley. His research interests are solving complex computer vision problems with least amount of data annotations.

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Yunzhong Hou

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Yunzhong Hou joined the Centre in June 2019 as an Associated PhD researcher at ANU. He is working under the supervision of Centre Associate Investigator Dr. Liang Zheng and Chief Investigator Prof. Stephen Gould. His research interests include multi-object tracking, multiview detection, and reinforcement learning for navigation.Yunzhong is working across the Robots, Humans and Action, and Manipulation & Vision Centre Research Projects.

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Shihao ‘Zac’ Jiang

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Shihao Jiang is a PhD researcher in Australian National University, working under the supervision of Richard Hartley, Dylan Campbell, Miaomiao Liu and Stephen Gould. His research interests include geometric vision, optimization and deep learning. Prior to his PhD, he received his Bachelor of Engineering degree with first class honours in 2016, major in Electronic and Communication Systems.

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Adrian Johnston

University of Adelaide, Australia

Adrian completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the University of Adelaide before joining a research group for twelve months, where he worked on software engineering tools for the Defense Science Technology Group. He then returned to complete his honours degree in Computer Science, graduating with first class honours. Prior to beginning his PhD, he worked as a software engineer for the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML). He commenced PhD studies in 2015 under the supervision of Professor Gustavo Carneiro. Adrian’s PhD research is focused on 3D object reconstruction using Deep Learning. He is currently, completing his PhD part-time while working for LifeWhisperer developing Computer Vision and AI techniques for IVF. He will complete his PhD in early 2020.

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Dongxu Li

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Dongxu Li acquired his Bachelor degree in Advanced Computing from The Australian National University (First-class Honours). His research interests are mainly in the field of vision and language and human-robot interaction. He joined the Centre as an Associated PhD Researcher in 2019 and is supervised by Chief Investigators Professor Hongdong Li and Professor Stephen Gould. Dongxu is working across the Robots, Humans and Action, and Vision and Language projects.

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Yao Lu

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Yao Lu is a PhD student in Australian National University, under the supervision of Richard Hartley, Hongdong Li and Mehrtash Harandi. His main research interests are optical flow, optimization and learning on videos. He obtained his master degree in computer science in University of Helsinki, under the supervision of Aapo Hyvarinen and Michael Gutmann. He is part of the Centre’s Scene Understanding and Learning research project teams.

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Cuong Nguyen

University of Adelaide, Australia

Cuong Nguyen is a PhD researcher at The University of Adelaide. He received his Bachelor degree from Portland State University, USA in 2012, and his MPhil degree from The University of Adelaide in 2018. He is interested in creating intelligent machines that can quickly learn from only a few examples. He joined the Centre in 2020 to research in meta-learning, a challenging field that builds algorithms for robots to quickly adapt to new tasks or new environments with a limited number of training examples. He is supervised by Centre Chief Investigator Gustavo Carneiro and is working in the Centre’s Learning Project.

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Ehab Salahat

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Ehab Salahat is a Ph.D. researcher at the Australian National Univerity. He completed his Master’s studies in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Bachelor of Science in Communications Engineering (with first-class honors) in 2015 and 2013, respectively.

During his studies, he was the recipient of many international and national prestigious scientific awards and honors. Additionally, his bachelor project was selected to be the best graduation project from the Communications Engineering department. He is the lead inventor for many embedded vision US patents.

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Fatemeh Shiri

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Fatemeh is a PhD researcher at the Australian National University (ANU), working under the supervision of Dr. Piotr Koniusz, Prof. Richard Hartley and Prof. Fatih Porikli. Prior to joining ANU and she worked in industry for 6 years. She received her Master of Science degree from Tarbiat Modares University. Her research interests include Deep Learning, Computer Vision, and Image Processing. She joined the Centre as an Associated PhD Researcher in late 2018.

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Zhiwei Xu

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Zhiwei Xu started his Ph.D. research in computer vision under the supervision of Professors Richard Hartley, Stephen Gould, and Hongdong Li since the middle of 2017. He joined the Centre in August 2018. Prior to that, he obtained a Master and a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering in China in 2015 and 2012 respectively, followed by 2 years’ experience in industry. His current research interest is learning MRF algorithms with deep learning in scene understanding.

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Jing Zhang

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Jing Zhang is currently a Ph.D student at the College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University. She received the B.E. degree and M.E degree in signal and information processing from Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xian, China, in 2007 and 2010 respectively. She was a visiting student at ANU from Dec. 2014 to Dec. 2016 with the support of the China Scholarship Council. Her research interests include saliency detection, edge detection and semantic segmentation. She won the Best Student Paper Prize at DICTA 2017 and the Best Deep/Machine Learning Paper Prize at APSIPA ASC 2017.

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Tong Zhang

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Tong Zhang joined the Centre as a PhD researcher at the Australian National University (ANU) in 2018. He obtained his masters degree from New York University in 2014 and his bachelor degree from Beihang University in 2011. He is mainly working on subspace clustering, weakly-supervised learning and generative models.

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PhD & Masters Graduates

Sourav Garg

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Sourav obtained his Bachelors in Electronics and Communication from Thapar University, India in 2012. After graduating, he worked in the robotics research group of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for 3 years where he conducted research in the field of robotic and computer vision. In particular, he was involved in projects like: human and object tracking, product counting in a retail shop environment, and a tea-serving robot in an office environment.

Motivated to delve deeper into robotic vision, Sourav commenced his Ph.D. at QUT in 2015. His thesis title is “Robust Visual Place Recognition under Simultaneous Viewpoint and Appearance Variations”. His Ph.D. research explored ways to exploit visual semantic information, 3D geometry, and deep-learnt CNNs for visual place recognition. Sourav’s thesis was supervised by Professor Michael Milford (Principal) and Dr. Niko Suenderhauf (Associate).

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Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

University of Adelaide, Australia

Mehdi was a PhD researcher in computer vision at the University of Adelaide under the supervision of Chief Investigators Ian Reid and  Anton van den Hengel. He obtained his bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering in 2009 and his masters degree in Control Systems in 2013. His research interests are semantic visual SLAM, probabilistic graphical models and machine learning in robotic vision applications.

Mehdi completed in PhD in 2019.

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Jasmin Martin

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Jasmin completed her undergraduate study at QUT in 2015 with a Bachelor of Mechatronics Engineering. Her PhD was titled “Quickly Detecting Aircraft in Image Sequences” and was supervised by Associate Investigator Jason Ford and QUT Research Associate Dr Timothy Molloy. Her research has focused strongly on control systems, and she has three publications in high quality journals on topics related to vision-based detection of aircraft. She has been a sessional academic throughout her PhD and is co-teaching units in foundations of electrical engineering, and control and dynamic systems.

In 2019, Jasmin was appointed as an Associate Lecturer in the Robotics and Autonomous systems discipline at QUT.

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Andres Felipe Marmol Velez

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Andres F. Marmol V. pursued his PhD degree as part of the Medical and Healthcare Robotics in the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision, submitting his thesis in August 2019. His research employs the latest techniques in robotic navigation and visual servoing into the most common orthopaedic procedure in the world: Knee arthroscopy. Ultimately, Andres aims at making minimally invasive surgical procedures safer for patients, while alleviating surgeons’ current physical and mental burdens. Andres devotes his free time to various sports like tennis, inline-skating and parkour. He also sets up small microcontroller based projects and likes to play with novel electronic gadgets.

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Sean McMahon

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Sean graduated from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) with a Bachelor of Engineering, majoring in Mechatronics with honours in 2014. He joined the Centre in 2015 and his  research focused on visual affordance detection for improved robotic perceptual understanding in unconstrained environments. A key application area for his research is hazard detection on construction sites. This is because hazards are defined by their of affordance rather than their object type; for example, a ladder leaning against a wall is less of a trip hazard compared to a ladder lying horizontally on the ground. Sean won best 3 minute thesis presentation at the Centre’s Robovis symposium in 2016 and has undertaken numerous teaching roles in advanced robotics and microprocessor courses. He submitted his PhD thesis for examination in 2018 and started a 3 month internship in the robotics Research and Development area of construction company Laing O’Rourke in Sydney. In June 2019, he was awarded his PhD titled “Direct Visual Hazard Affordance Detection.”

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Dana Rezazadegan

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Dana received her Bachelors of Science in Electronic Engineering from the Isfahan University of Technology (IUT), Esfahan, Iran in 2006. After completing her degree, she worked at Behineh niroo Espadan Engineering Company and the IUERC (Isfahan University Engineering Research Center) until 2014 where she led the design and simulation of electronic circuits and developed microcontrollers for monitoring electronic devices. She continued her study in control engineering and obtained her Master Degree in 2013. Her research area was the trajectory tracking control of mobile robots where she focused on developing an adaptive back-stepping controller for an autonomous underwater vehicle, AUV, in the presence of parametric uncertainties.

She was awarded her PhD titled “Human Action Recognition and Prediction for Robotics Applications” in March 2019.

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Rodrigo Fonseca Santa Cruz Oliveira

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Rodrigo joined the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision as a PhD candidate to work on semantic scene understanding, the challenging task of building machines that can interpret images and video as humans do at first glance. This is crucial for robots interact with people and their environment. Rodrigo’s research project aims to build systems that can efficiently extract semantically meaningful interpretations of the complex visual world.

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Jean-Luc Stevens

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Jean-Luc was an MPhil researcher at the Australian National University and submitted his thesis in 2019 titled “Autonomous Visual Navigation of a Quadrotor VTOL in complex and dense environments”. His MPhil was based on the control of a quadrotor using visual information for autonomous control, working with his supervisor Prof. Robert Mahony. He completed his Bachelor of Engineering (Advanced) (Electrical) at Western Sydney University in 2015, receiving the University Medal for academic achievement. Jean-Luc competed in the 2015 World Solar Challenge with the Western Sydney University Solar Car Project, and is now working in collaboration with the new Australian National University Solar Car Team (Sol Invictus).

He is now a Mechatronics Engineer at Blueprint Lab in Sydney.

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Yan Zuo

Monash University, Australia

Yan completed his PhD titled “Advances in Decision Forests and Ferns with Applications in Deep Representation Learning for Computer Vision” in 2019 under the supervision of Chief Investigator Professor Tom Drummond. During his PhD, his research focused on a family of learning algorithms categorised as ensemble learning methods. His work involved investigating methods for incorporating decision forests and decision ferns within deep learning frameworks and applying them to computer vision. These applications include a range of tasks including image classification, image segmentation, image synthesis and video prediction. He then joined the Centre as a Research Fellow in June 2019 and his current research is focused on solving problems in machine perceptron using learning approaches such as Generative Adversarial Networks and Reinforcement Learning for navigation and mapping within the Learning project of the Centre.

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Engineers

Sam Bahrami

University of Adelaide, Australia

Sam is a Research Programmer who comes from a software engineering background, having worked in both technology and defence companies throughout Australia. As a research programmer, he is working on implementing solutions for novel navigation behaviour for robots and self driving cars based on deep machine learning.

Sam has a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical & Electronic) Honours and a Bachelor of Mathematics & Computer Science from the University of Adelaide.

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Alex Martin

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

In 2008 I started with the ANU in the Computer Vision and Robotics group lead by Prof Rob Mahony, Jonghyuk Kim, Hongdong Li and Jochen Trumpf. Since starting at the ANU, the Centre of Excellence for Computer vision has been established and I have been involved with many projects within the centre including stereo vision water detection, multi camera array sensors, high speed optical flow hardware on quad rotors and work with light field cameras.  Our lab has a 4WD vehicle that is used for acquiring various data sets, numerous quadrotor aerial vehicles and a flight environment with VICON.  We also have a UR5 robotic arm and work cell used for computer vision and human/robot interaction.  I am helping to develop an environment to test high speed optical flow based machine control.

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Steve Martin

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

I graduated with a Bachelor of Mechatronics from QUT in 2009 and a former PhD student at the original QUT Cyphy Lab with Gordon Wyeth and Peter Corke. I rejoined QUT and the Centre in February 2016 as a research engineer to assist with the engineering requirements as the Centre grew. Within the group I work on a huge range of projects from general day to day robot maintenance such to software development or electrical design work.

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Thomas Rowntree

University of Adelaide

Tom is a Research Programmer based at the University of Adelaide. He joined the Centre in February 2017 and was a key member of Team ACRV who competed and won the 2017 Amazon Robotics Challenge in Japan. Tom completed his Bachelor of Engineering in Mechatronics, Robotics and Automation Engineering in 2012.

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Garima Samvedi

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Garima joins the Centre as a Research Engineer primarily working on the UGV Kelpie project with main focus on sensor integration, object detection and path planning. She joins us from Boeing Defence Australia, where she worked as a software engineer, led flight tests and release of SDK documentation. This builds upon her experience within CRCMining (CMTE Developmental Ltd) where she spent over 5 years as an automation engineer on a multitude of projects with clients such as Caterpillar, Joy Global and ACARP. In particular, during this time she successfully integrated a sensor suite of GPS, LiDAR and IMU for data collection, developed software algorithms for large excavator dig cycle control, lead scaled tests and performed FEA analysis on hardware mounting parameters.

Prior to this, Garima was at NICTA working on a project on bionic eye image segmentation using statistical techniques (computer vision algorithms using Markov Chain models). She has a B Engineering (Computer Vision) Hons I and a B Economics from ANU.

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Rohan Smith

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Rohan received his Bachelor of Mechatronics from QUT in 2016. He worked on QUT’s Robotronica event in 2015 and was part of the team of postdoctoral research fellows, PhD researchers and undergraduate students working on the winning entry to the Amazon Robotics Challenge in 2017.

Rohan has been working as a research engineer at QUT on the Centre’s Robotic Vision Evaluation and Benchmarking project since mid 2018. He is establishing and maintaining multiple mobile robot platforms for use by Centre researchers. Rohan hopes to make it easier for researchers to develop better ways for robots to interact with the real world.

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Gavin Suddrey

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Gavin graduated from QUT with a Bachelor in Games and Interactive Entertainment (Software Technology) in 2011, and a Bachelor of Information Technology (Honours I) in 2014. He was previously a PhD student within the Robotics and Autonomous Systems group at QUT with Frederic Maire. Gavin returned to QUT in 2017 as a software engineer on the humanoid robotics project. In his role he worked on expanding the general capabilities of the Pepper robot, primarily through the use of vision, whilst also working to assist both researchers and students within the Centre and wider QUT community in utilising Pepper within their own research.

In August 2019, Gavin joined the Centre as a research engineer and is based in the Centre headquarters at QUT.

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Ben Talbot

Queensland University of Technology

Ben is a Research Associate based at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT). He joined the Centre in September 2018 after being awarded his PhD in the same month. Ben’s PhD research explored how mobile robots can understand the symbols humans use to navigate (like labels, arrows, signs, gestures, spoken directions, maps, floor plans, etc.), and use this understanding to navigate unseen built environments. His research interests include artificial intelligence, cognitive robotics, and real robot outcomes.

In his role within the Robotic Vision and Evaluation Benchmarking project he is working on establishing multiple mobile robot platforms for use by Centre researchers. By increasing the flexibility, reliability, and ease of access to mobile robots, Ben hopes to help researchers evaluate and demonstrate their latest exciting research outcomes on real robots.

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Operations Team

Katrina Tune

Queensland University of Technology

Katrina has over 15 years of experience working within Australian Universities, having held senior roles within the Melbourne Law School and UQ’s Schools of Business and Medicine.

More recently Katrina has held a dual role with HealthCert, a private medical education provider, as their National Partnerships Manager and as General Manager of their not for profit arm, The Skin Cancer Institute. She is also a Director on the Board of Epilepsy Queensland, a cause close to her heart. Katrina is passionate about transformational leadership, organisational culture, equity and diversity in the workplace, and trying to find the fun wherever possible.

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Kate Aldridge

Queensland University of Technology

Kate joined the Centre in October 2015. She looks after the day-to-day operations of the Centre including communications, event organisation, operational and strategic planning, and coordinating high level administration across the different Centre nodes. She coordinates the Centre’s Research Training program, events & workshops, internal newsletters, data collection and reporting. She loves working in the Centre’s dynamic and creative environment.

Kate has worked in research support since 2008. Before joining the Centre, she was based in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT. During that time she supported a cohort of 350 research students and academic supervisors and facilitated the Faculty’s research training program. Prior to QUT, she worked as an English Instructor in Japan for nearly 4 years and has a further 10 years’ experience in service delivery roles. She commenced in the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program at QUT in 2015 and exited with the Graduate Certificate in Business Administration in 2016 to focus on her role and young family.

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Sarah Allen

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Before working at the Centre, Sarah lived in New Zealand and worked as a Compliance Support Officer for the Inland Revenue Department.

During her time here at Robotic Vision, she has helped plan and run our Annual Symposiums, RoboVis, at various locations across Australia.

In her spare time, Sarah likes to be with her family, scrapbook and play video/PC games.

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Shani Fernando

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Shani joined QUT in 2011 as a Project Officer with the Centre for Tropical Crops and Biocommodities (CTCB). She then moved into Finance Officer roles with the Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI) and the Creative Industries Faculty. Shani has extensive experience in customer service, financial processing, reconciliation and office administration.

She is a member of CPA Australia and a graduate of the University of Sri Jayawardenapura (Sri Lanka) with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Business Administration.

Outside work, Shani enjoys spending time with her family and snuggling with her dog, Ollie.

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Ireen Khan

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Ireen joined the Centre as a Personal Assistant to Centre Director, Distinguished Professor Peter Corke in September 2018.

Ireen brings extensive C-suite Executive Assistant support experience to the role, having worked for large corporate organisations including Deloitte, RACQ, Suncorp and ANZ.

In her free time, Ireen volunteers with the Pyjama Foundation helping kids read and write in their foster care homes, teaches body balance, and loves spending time with family, friends and dog Laila.

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Thuy Mai

University of Adelaide, Australia

Thuy is the Node Administration Officer at the University of Adelaide.

Thuy’s responsibilities, in regards to the ACRV and ACVT, include financial and administrative operations for the Adelaide node of the centre, including recruitment and HR and co-ordination of research grants; Coordinate and undertake financial reporting obligations including providing advice and facilitating information flows between researchers and Finance Management Accountants; Develop and maintain the collection of critical research data, metrics and outputs with timely delivery of reports; liaison with partner nodes and lead node (QUT) administrative personnel that is aligned to the School and Centre’s strategic plan.

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Sandra Pedersen

Monash University

Sandra has been working in administration for many years and since August 2015 for ARC Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision’s Monash University node with Professor Tom Drummond.

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Carol Taylor

Australian National University (ANU), Australia

Carol Taylor is the Node Administration Officer at the Australian National University (ANU).  She has previously worked in Administration at the ANU including the ARC Centre of Excellence for Free Radical Chemistry and Biotechnology within the Research School of Chemistry and at the Research School of Pacific Studies and the Australian College of Mental Health Nurses. Outside of work Carol enjoys spending time with her family, reading, dancing and having a cup of tea.

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Shelley Thomas

Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia

Shelley joined the Australian Centre for Robotic Vision as Communications Specialist in July 2018. Convinced that everyone has a story to tell, she was our resident ‘Chatbot’ of sorts. Shelley brought 30 years’ experience in media and communications to the Centre from diverse roles across Australia and overseas, including in England, Africa, Hong Kong and the Galápagos Islands. In 2020, Shelley left the Centre for a seachange to the Sunshine Coast with her family.

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