Sethu Vijayakumar

Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE is Professor of Robotics at the University of Edinburgh and a judge on the BBC2 show Robot Wars. He was instrumental in bringing the first NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot out of the United States of America, and to Europe, where it is a focus of research at Edinburgh Centre for Robotics.

Vijayakumar's articles on Incremental online learning in high dimensions, and Natural actor-critic, have been cited over 450 times each in academic papers and he won the IEEE Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award 2013.

After a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Vijayakumar became a Post Doctoral Fellow in the Laboratory for Information Synthesis, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan. He worked as a research scientist at the Kawato Dynamic Brain Project, Kyoto, before heading to the University of Southern California as a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow.

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

In 2007 Vijayakumar was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship in Learning Robotics, co-funded by Microsoft Research.

He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2013.

Vijayakumar is an active science communicator, giving public talks and media interviews. In 2015 the University of Edinburgh awarded him its annual Tam Dalyell Prize for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science and in 2016 he presented a series of robot demonstrations at the television launch of BBC micro:bit live lessons. He featured in Stargazing Live with Dara O Briain, March 2017.

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