About Me

I am a researcher [PhD candidate] at IDSIA (Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale), a Swiss AI lab in Lugano. My research is in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Robotics, with my main interests being Humanoids, Evolutionary Robotics, Robotic Exploration and Multi-Robot Systems.

Previously I was a Young Graduate Trainee at the European Space Agency's Advanced Concepts Team. My work there included Space Security and Artificial Intelligence, with projects in multi-agent simulation of spacecraft clusters and evolving neurocontrollers for spacecraft rendezvous and docking.

Feel free to contact me via email or social networks (see the links on the right).

Earlier Studies & Research

My graduate studies included the "Joint European Master in Space Science and Technology" programme, where I graduated with a Master's Thesis on 'Multi-Robot Cooperation in Space Applications' at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) in Finland. I had the great opportunity to work for 3 months at the Intelligent Space Systems Laboratory of the University of Tokyo, Japan. In the first year of my MSc studies one semester was held in Würzburg, Germany (JMUW) and the second at the Kiruna Space Campus in northern Sweden.

In 2007 I was working as a programmer & researcher at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, implementing a fast depth perception algorithm, based on disparity maps, for humanoid robots using the iCub plaform, which at that time was still in its early stages (see paper). I received my Bachelor of Science from the Vienna University of Technology (TU) in Software Engineering with for my BSc thesis about Processing and programming done at the DECO research team. I am still enrolled as a student in the Computational Intelligence MSc programme at the TU.

My Curriculum Vitae can be downloaded here

or see my visual CV on visualize.me

More information about my studies at varies universities and for multiple degrees, as well as, my attendence of various summer schools can be found here.

Publications

A list of my publications, in chronological order, can be found here. Most of them are related to my projects listed here, the SpaceMaster Robotics Team or the Advanced Concepts Team.

Teaching

I will be a teaching assistant for the Systems Programming course offered in at the Universita della Svizzera italiana (USI) (Fall 2011)

I was a teaching assistent for the Robotics lectures and laboratory at the Universita della Svizzera italiana (USI) (Spring 2011)

I was an assistent for the "User Interface Design" and "Usability Engineering" courses at the DECO laboratory of the TU Wien (2006-2007)

Other Things

I review for the Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics (JACIII) (Spring 2011)

I review for the Journal of Field Robotics (JFR) (2010-2011)

I reviewed for the Springer Wireless Networks journal (2011)

I reviewed for the IEEE Intelligent Systems Magazine special issue on AI in Space (Sep/Oct 2010)

The SpaceMaster Robotics Team, which currently has David and me as team-members, website is also hosted here. SMRT is a student team participating in various competitions, workshops and conferences.

My soup, a microblog can be found here! I am currently trying to setup a blog with relevant posts about my projects, the research related or just general musings about being a PhD student.