Biography

Simon Stepputtis is a PhD Student at Arizona State University and part of the Interactive Robotics Laboratory lead by Prof. Heni Ben Amor. He majors in Computer Science with a strong focus on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Prior to that he received a bachelor and master degree in Engineering and Computing from the TU Bergakademie Freiberg. During his time in Germany, he worked within the Humanoid Robotics Group Freiberg under the lead of Prof. Bernhard Jung.

Throughout his academic career, he works on bridging the gap between cognition and robotics by using modern approaches to artificial intelligence, specifically by enhancing imitation learning with natural language processing. The novelty of his work lies in using language as a natural interface for humans to convey their intention to the robot, while it allows the robot to communicate its intention back to the human. His recent work on this topic, presented at the Southwest Robotics Symposium 2019, was awarded the best poster award by NVIDIA.

For additional information and a tabularly summary, please refer to his CV.