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Andrzej Pronobis
UW KTH

My goal is to build end-to-end systems that can traverse our world freely, share autonomy with human users, and self-extend through learning and natural interaction.

My research is at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, and human-robot interaction. I am particularly interested in learning approaches that enable intelligent agents to perceive, explore, and understand large human environments in order to plan and execute complex tasks in collaboration with humans. I develop theoretical and algorithmic solutions, implement them as robotic systems, and deploy them in the real world.

I was a research associate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle as well as a senior researcher at the Robotics, Perception and Learning Lab at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. At UW, I worked with Rajesh Rao, Dieter Fox and Maya Cakmak, and I was affiliated with the UW Reality Lab.

In Dec 2011, I received my Ph.D in robotics from KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Before joining UW in 2013, I was the Head of Research at OculusAI Technologies, a startup developing mobile applications for vision-based product recognition. Between 2006 and 2012, I was part of the EU integrated projects CoSy, CogX and DIRAC.

Projects

Publications

Scholar
Citations: 3231 h-index: 27 i10-index: 42

Selected Publications

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

Peer Reviewed Conference Papers

Book Chapters

  • Semantic Modelling of Space
    (A. Pronobis, P. Jensfelt, K. Sjöö, H. Zender, G.-J. Kruijff, O. Mozos, W. Burgard), In: Cognitive Systems (H. Christensen, G.-J. Kruijff, J. Wyatt, eds.), Volume 8 of Cognitive Systems Monographs, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010.
  • The Explorer System
    (K. Sjöö, H. Zender, P. Jensfelt, G.-J. Kruijff, A. Pronobis, N. Hawes, M. Brenner), In: Cognitive Systems (H. Christensen, G.-J. Kruijff, J. Wyatt, eds.), Volume 8 of Cognitive Systems Monographs, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010.
  • Multi-cue Discriminative Place Recognition
    (L. Xing, A. Pronobis), In: Multilingual Information Access Evaluation Vol. II Multimedia Experiments (C. Peters, B. Caputo, J. Gonzalo, G. Jones, J. Kalpathy-Cramer, H. Müller, T. Tsikrika, eds.), Volume 6242 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2010.
  • Overview of the ImageCLEF@ICPR 2010 Robot Vision Track
    (A. Pronobis, H. Christensen, B. Caputo), In: Recognizing Patterns in Signals, Speech, Images and Videos (D. Ünay, Z. Çataltepe, S. Aksoy, eds.), Volume 6388 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010.
  • The Robot Vision Task
    (A. Pronobis, B. Caputo), In: ImageCLEF (H. Müller, P. Clough, T. Deselaers, B. Caputo, eds.), Volume 32 of The Information Retrieval Series, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 2010.
  • Overview of the CLEF 2009 Robot Vision Track
    (A. Pronobis, L. Xing, B. Caputo), In: Multilingual Information Access Evaluation Vol. II Multimedia Experiments (C. Peters, B. Caputo, J. Gonzalo, G. Jones, J. Kalpathy-Cramer, H. Müller, T. Tsikrika, eds.), Volume 6242 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2010.

Peer-reviewed Workshop Papers

Technical Reports

Advising

Co-advised Ph.D. Students

  • Junha Roh, Ph.D. Student, UW, Apr 2017–Present
  • Francesco Riccio, Visiting Ph.D. Student, UW, Oct 2016–Apr 2017
  • Michael Jae-Yoon Chung, Ph.D. Candidate, UW, Jun 2014–Jun 2015
  • Johan Ekekrantz, Ph.D. Candidate, KTH, Jan 2012–Feb 2013
  • Alper Aydemir, Ph.D. 2012, KTH, Jul 2011–Nov 2012

Advised M.Sc. and B.Sc. Theses

  • Kaiyu Zheng, UW, B.Sc. 2017
    "Learning Large-Scale Semantic Maps with Sum-Product Networks"
    Shortlisted for the UW CSE Best Senior Thesis Award

  • Kousuke Ariga, UW, B.Sc. 2017
    "Semi-Supervised Spatial Knowledge Transfer with Deep Generative Models"
    Shortlisted for the UW CSE Best Senior Thesis Award

  • Björgvin Ólafsson, KTH, OculusAI, M.Sc. 2016
    "Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes for Faster Object Recognition"

  • Andreas Bruse, KTH, OculusAI, M.Sc. 2015
    "Exploiting Cloud Resources For Semantic Scene Understanding On Mobile Robots"

  • Nima Behzad, KTH, M.Sc. 2013
    "Modeling 3D Object Context"

  • Nikolaus Demmel, KTH, B.Sc. 2012
    "Detecting Novel Concepts in Semantic Mapping with Mobile Robots"

  • André Susano Pinto, KTH, M.Sc. 2011
    "Novelty Detection for Semantic Place Categorization"

  • Li Xing, KTH, M.Sc. 2010
    "Multi-cue Visual Place Classification for Mobile Robotic Systems"

  • Muhammad Muneeb Ullah, KTH, M.Sc. 2007
    "Vision-based Indoor Place Recognition using Local Features"

  • Jie Luo, KTH, M.Sc. 2007
    "Incremental Learning for Adaptive Visual Place Recognition in Dynamic Environments"
    Best Master’s thesis award of the Swedish AI Society

Teaching

Currently, I'm teaching the following courses at the University of Washington:

I taught the following courses at KTH Royal Institute of Technology:

Other short courses I prepared:

Activities & Recognition

Grants & Fellowships

  • 2013 - Swedish Research Council Project Grant for Junior Researchers (PI) Prestigious, nation-wide grant in natural and engineering sciences of 3,500,000 SEK (400,000 USD) and acceptance rate of 2.5%.
  • 2013 - Toyota Research Grant (Co-PI) Grant for postdoctoral research at the University of Washington (85,000 USD).
  • 2017 - Google Research Sponsorship Sponsorship for organizing the ICML Workshop on Principled Approaches to Deep Learning.
  • 2008 - DIRAC (EU FP6 Integrated Project) Training Programme Fellowship for research at the Idiap Research Institute.

Awards

  • 2017 - Finalist for the Google Best Paper Award at the ICML Workshop on Principled Approaches to Deep Learning Paper: "Library for Learning and Inference with Sum-Product Networks and TensorFlow"
  • 2014 - Postdoc Research AwardUniversity of Washington, Computer Science & Engineering
  • 2012 - Shortlisted for the 2012 EURON Georges Giralt PhD Award Ph.D. thesis in the top nine Ph.D. theses in robotics in Europe.
  • 2012 - Finalist for the ICRA Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Award Paper: "Large-scale Semantic Mapping and Reasoning with Heterogeneous Modalities"
  • 2009 - Winning robot in the CogX Cognitive Robot Programming Competition
  • 2010 - Winning project in the Excitera 2010 Innovation Challenge

Editorial Appointments

  • 2018 - Associate Editor 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
  • 2017 - Associate Editor 2018 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
  • 2014 - Associate Editor 2015 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
  • 2009–2010 - Associate Editor Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics

Program Committees

  • Sep 2014 - ECCV 2014 Workshop on Consumer Depth Cameras for Computer Vision
  • Jul 2014 - AAAI 2014 Workshop on Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
  • Mar 2014 - AAAI Spring Symposium 2014: Qualitative Representations for Robots

Reviewing

  • Conferences: Science and Systems (RSS), International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), European Conference on Mobile Robotics (ECMR)
  • Journals: International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), Transactions on Robotics (T-RO), Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS), Autonomous Robots (AURO)
  • Grants: University of Washington Royalty Research Fund

Chairing

  • 2017 - Chair, IROS session "RGBD Perception"
  • 2017 - Co-Chair, IROS session "Deep Learning in Robotics and Automation"

Contact

Email : orp.sibonorp@a