Sethu Vijayakumar wins Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship

We have just received the welcome news that Sethu Vijayakumar, Director of the Institute for Perception, Action, and Behaviour, will be awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship, co-funded by Microsoft Research starting August 2007.

Congratulations to Sethu, and many thanks to Microsoft Research and the Royal Academy of Engineering for their generous support.

One of the central issues of 21st Century Informatics will be how to link, in theory and in practice, computational perception, representation, transformation and generation processes to external worlds. Motor control, translating purpose into action, is a key example. Humans and other biological systems are very adept at performing fast, complicated motor control tasks in spite of large sensorimotor delays while being fairly robust to noise and perturbations. Sethu will use his Fellowship to develop the Statistical Machine Learning and Motor Control group, working on techniques that will allow robots to do the same. He proposes to develop machine learning techniques to solve outstanding problems in autonomous systems in the areas of adaptive sensing and sensorimotor control, to integrate and test these techniques on an anthropomorphic robotic platform, and to develop controllers that can generate accurate and fast movements, while ensuring safety in a human-machine interaction scenario.