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Iye Szin Ang, M.Sc.

Doctoral Student at the Montanuniversität Leoben

Short bio: Iye Szin Ang join the CPS team in Nov. 2023 as doctoral student. Before that she completed her Master thesis at the chair within the Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree in Photonics for Security Reliability and Safety (PSRS). Her thesis topic was on human-robot interaction using sign language. 

Continuing her prior work, she aims in her doctoral study at creating a natural and intuitive way for humans to communicate with machines. This approach will not only make robots more inclusive and accessible, but also provide a non-verbal and non-intrusive way for people to control and communicate with them. With a passion for advancing the field of CPS through cutting-edge research and innovation, Iye Szin is dedicated to creating more meaningful and inclusive technology for everyone.

Research Interests

  • Robotics
  • Human-Robot-Interaction
  • Deep Learning

Thesis

Contact

Iye Szin Ang, B.Sc
Doctoral Student at the Chair of Cyber-Physical-Systems
Montanuniversität Leoben
Franz-Josef-Straße 18, 
8700 Leoben, Austria 

Email: iye.ang@unileoben.ac.at




Melanie Neubauer, M.Sc.

Ph.D. Student at the Montanuniversität Leoben

Hi! My Name is Melanie Neubauer and I started at the CPS-Chair in April 2023. 

I studied Industrial Logistics at the Montanuniversität Leoben, where I passed my  Master’s defense in March 2023.

In my doctoral work, I investigate  deep neural networks for image processing in cyber-physical-systems combined with inverse reinforcement learning techniques.

The title of my doctoral work is: Vision-based Deep Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Research Interests

  • Cyber-Physical-Systems 
  • Robotics
  • Machine Learning

Contact

M.Sc. Melanie Neubauer
Doctoral Student supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert since April 2023.
Montanuniversität Leoben
Franz-Josef-Straße 18, 
8700 Leoben, Austria 

Phone:  +43 3842 402 – 1901 (Sekretariat CPS)

Email:   melanie.neubauer@unileoben.ac.at
Web Work: CPS-Page
Chat: WEBEX

Publications

Sorry, no publications matched your criteria.




Fotios (Fotis) Lygerakis, M.Eng.

Short Bio

Hi! My name is Fotis and I am a doctoral student and university assistant at CPS since March 2022!

I am deeply invested in advancing machine learning and robotics, aiming to mimic human learning processes through abstraction, incremental conclusions, transfer learning, and creativity.

My research interests are centered on representation learning, robot learning, and human-robot interaction, with a focus on employing self-supervised learning methods, both contrastive and non-contrastive, as well as reinforcement learning techniques. Specifically, my work is dedicated to advancing the fields of computer vision and visuomotor as well as visuotactile motor learning, targeting manipulation tasks. This involves exploring innovative ways to enable robots to understand and interact with their environment through visual and tactile feedback, enhancing their ability to perform complex and tactile-rich manipulation tasks.

Before starting my PhD at the University of Leoben, I held positions as a teaching assistant at the University of Texas at Arlington, a research assistant at Demokritos in Athens, and a research intern at Toshiba Research Europe in Cambridge.

My work includes contributions to representation learning, reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation, healthcare robotics, and dialogue systems. I am also active in teaching, technical skill development, outreach, reviewing, and conference activities, committing to the scientific community to the best of my powers.


Research Interests​

  1. Advanced Representation Learning

    • Self-supervised Learning: Variational Autoencoders, Contrastive Learning
    • Information Theoretical Approaches in Learning
  2. Robot Learning and Manipulation

    • Efficient Reinforcement Learning: Sample Efficiency, Multi-modal Approaches
    • Visuomotor and Visuotactile Learning for Manipulation
  3. Human-Robot Interaction

  4. Practical Machine Learning Applications

    • Robotics in Healthcare: Assistive Technologies, Dialogue Systems
    • Industrial Automation: Inspection and Process Optimization

 

Theses and Internship Supervision

Thesis Topics

  • Self-supervised Visual Representation Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning algorithms and Robot Learning
  • Augmented Reality (Hololens2) Robot Interface
  • Human Robot Interaction

Current & Past Theses

  • [M.Sc. Thesis/Internship] ROS2-based Human-Robot Interaction Framework with Sign Language, Iye Szin Ang, August 2023
  • [M.Sc. Thesis] Development of a Graphical User Interface and Deep Learning Methods for Automated Inspection in a Continuous Casting Steel Plant, Melanie Neubauer, March 2023

 

Students who wish to do their thesis under my supervision, shall choose their subject within the list of my research interests above. Feel free to contact me via email for further clarifications or directions.

Teaching

  • 190.013 Introduction to Machine Learning Lab, Summer Semester 2023
  • 190.015 Applied Machine and Deep Learning, Winter Semester 2023
  • Proud founder of the Neural Coffee Reading Group.

Consultation

Companies, fellow colleagues or students who wish consultation on any of my research interests or background can contact me via email: fotios.lygerakis@unileoben.ac.at

Contact

M.Eng. Fotios Lygerakis
Doctoral Student supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert
Montanuniversität Leoben
Franz-Josef-Straße 18, 
8700 Leoben, Austria 

Phone:  +43 3842 402 – 1901 (Secretary of CPS)
Email: fotios.lygerakis@unileoben.ac.at
Chat: WEBEX

Publications

2024

Lygerakis, Fotios; Dave, Vedant; Rueckert, Elmar

M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation Proceedings Article

In: IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR 2024), 2024.

Links | BibTeX

M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Dave*, Vedant; Lygerakis*, Fotios; Rueckert, Elmar

Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training Proceedings Article

In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024)., 2024, (* equal contribution).

Links | BibTeX

Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training

2023

Lygerakis, Fotios; Rueckert, Elmar

CR-VAE: Contrastive Regularization on Variational Autoencoders for Preventing Posterior Collapse Proceedings Article

In: Asian Conference of Artificial Intelligence Technology (ACAIT)., IEEE, 2023.

Links | BibTeX

CR-VAE: Contrastive Regularization on Variational Autoencoders for Preventing Posterior Collapse

2021

Lygerakis, Fotios; Dagioglou, Maria; Karkaletsis, Vangelis

Accelerating Human-Agent Collaborative Reinforcement Learning Conference

In Proceedings of the 14th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference (PETRA '21), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 90–92, 2021.

Links | BibTeX

Accelerating Human-Agent Collaborative Reinforcement Learning

Banerjee, Debapriya; Lygerakis, Fotios; Makedon, Fillia

Sequential Late Fusion Technique for Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis Conference

In Proceedings of the 14th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference (PETRA '21), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 264–265. , 2021.

Links | BibTeX

Sequential Late Fusion Technique for Multi-modal Sentiment Analysis

Kyrarini, Maria; Lygerakis, Fotios; Rajavenkatanarayanan, Akilesh; Sevastopoulos, Christos; Nambiappan, Harish Ram; Chaitanya, Kodur Krishna; Babu, Ashwin Ramesh; Mathew, Joanne; Makedon, Fillia

A Survey of Robots in Healthcare Journal Article

In: Technologies, vol. 9, iss. 8, 2021.

Links | BibTeX

 A Survey of Robots in Healthcare

2020

Lygerakis, Fotios; Tsitos, Athanasios C; Dagioglou, Maria; Makedon, Fillia; Karkaletsis, Vangelis

Evaluation of 3D markerless pose estimation accuracy using openpose and depth information from a single RGB-D camera Conference

In Proceedings of the 13th ACM International Conference on PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA '20), Article 75, 1–6 Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2020.

Links | BibTeX

Evaluation of 3D markerless pose estimation accuracy using openpose and depth information from a single RGB-D camera

Diakoloukas, Vassilios; Lygerakis, Fotios; Lagoudakis, Michail G; Kotti, Margarita

Variational Denoising Autoencoders and Least-Squares Policy Iteration for Statistical Dialogue Manager Journal Article

In: IEEE Signal Processing Letters , vol. 27, pp. 960-964, 2020.

Links | BibTeX

Variational Denoising Autoencoders and Least-Squares Policy Iteration for Statistical Dialogue Manager

2019

Lygerakis, Fotios; Diakoloulas, Vassilios; Lagoudakis, Michail; Kotti, Margarita

Robust Belief State Space Representation for Statistical Dialogue Managers Using Deep Autoencoders Conference

2019 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), 2019.

Links | BibTeX

Robust Belief State Space Representation for Statistical Dialogue Managers Using Deep Autoencoders




Vedant Dave, M.Sc.

Ph.D. Student at the Montanuniversität Leoben

Short bio: Mr. Vedant Dave started at CPS on 23rd September 2021. 

He received his Master degree in Automation and Robotics from Technische Universität Dortmund in 2021 with the study focus on Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. His thesis was entitled “Model-agnostic Reinforcement Learning Solution for Autonomous Programming of Robotic Motion”, which took place at at Mercedes-Benz AG. In the thesis, he implemented Reinforcement learning for the motion planning of manipulators in complex environments. Before that, he did his Research internship at Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, where he worked on Probabilistic Movement Primitives on Riemannian Manifolds.

Research Interests

  • Information Theoretic Reinforcement Learning
  • Curiosity and Empowerment
  • Multimodal learning for Robotics
  • Movement Primitives

Research Videos

https://cps.unileoben.ac.at/wp/TacProMPs_Humanoids2022_Video.mp4#t=1

Contact & Quick Links

M.Sc. Vedant Dave
Doctoral Student supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert.
Montanuniversität Leoben
Franz-Josef-Straße 18, 
8700 Leoben, Austria 

Phone:  +43 3842 402 – 1903
Email:   vedant.dave@unileoben.ac.at 
Web Work: CPS-Page
Chat: WEBEX

Personal Website
GitHub
Google Citations
LinkedIn
ORCID
Research Gate

Publications

2024

Lygerakis, Fotios; Dave, Vedant; Rueckert, Elmar

M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation Proceedings Article

In: IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR 2024), 2024.

Links | BibTeX

M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Dave*, Vedant; Lygerakis*, Fotios; Rueckert, Elmar

Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training Proceedings Article

In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2024)., 2024, (* equal contribution).

Links | BibTeX

Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training

2022

Dave, Vedant; Rueckert, Elmar

Can we infer the full-arm manipulation skills from tactile targets? Workshop

International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2022), 2022.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Can we infer the full-arm manipulation skills from tactile targets?

Dave, Vedant; Rueckert, Elmar

Predicting full-arm grasping motions from anticipated tactile responses Proceedings Article

In: International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids 2022), 2022.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Predicting full-arm grasping motions from anticipated tactile responses

Leonel, Rozo*; Vedant, Dave*

Orientation Probabilistic Movement Primitives on Riemannian Manifolds Proceedings Article

In: Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), pp. 11, 2022, (* equal contribution).

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Orientation Probabilistic Movement Primitives on Riemannian Manifolds




Linus Nwankwo, M.Sc.

Short Bio

Mr. Linus Nwankwo started as a PhD student at the Chair of Cyber-Physical-Systems (CPS) in August 2021.  Prior to joining CPS, he worked as a research intern at the Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringTechnische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany.

In 2020, he obtained his M.Sc. degree in Automation and Robotics, a speciality in control for Green Mechatronics (GreeM) at the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté (UBFC), France. In his M.Sc. thesis,  he implemented a stabilisation control for a mobile inverted pendulum robot and investigated the possibility of controlling and stabilising the robot via CANopen communication network.

Research Interests

  • Robotics
    • Simultaneous localization & mapping (SLAM)
    • Path planning & autonomous navigation
  • Machine Learning
    • Large language models (LLMs) and vision language models (VLMs) 
    • Supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning
    • Probabilistic learning for robotics 
  • Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)
    • Intention-aware planning for social service robots
    • Social-aware and norm learning navigation
    • LLMs and VLMs for HRI

Research Videos

https://cps.unileoben.ac.at/wp/OpenRobot_Nwankwo2022_lowQ.mp4#t=1

Contact & Quick Links

M.Sc. Linus Nwankwo
Doctoral Student supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert since August 2021.
Montanuniversität Leoben
Franz-Josef-Straße 18, 
8700 Leoben, Austria 

Phone:  +43 3842 402 – 1901 (Sekretariat CPS)
Email:   linus.nwankwo@unileoben.ac.at 
Web Work: CPS-Page
Web Private: https://sites.google.com/view/linus-nwankwo
Chat: WEBEX

Bio of M.Sc. Linus Nwankwo
DBLP
Frontiers Network
GitHub
Google Citations
LinkedIn
ORCID
Research Gate

Publications

2023

Nwankwo, Linus; Rueckert, Elmar

Understanding why SLAM algorithms fail in modern indoor environments Proceedings Article

In: International Conference on Robotics in Alpe-Adria-Danube Region (RAAD). , pp. 186 - 194, Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland., 2023.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

Understanding why SLAM algorithms fail in modern indoor environments

Nwankwo, Linus; Fritze, Clemens; Bartsch, Konrad; Rueckert, Elmar

ROMR: A ROS-based Open-source Mobile Robot Journal Article

In: HardwareX, vol. 15, pp. 1–29, 2023.

Abstract | Links | BibTeX

ROMR: A ROS-based Open-source Mobile Robot




Nikolaus Feith, M.Sc.

Ph.D. Student at the Montanuniversität Leoben

Hello, my name is N. N. and I started working at the Chair for CPS in June 2021. After finishing my Master’s degree in Mining Mechanical Engineering at the University of Leoben in June 2022, I started my PhD at the CPS Chair in July 2022.

In my PhD thesis, I am investigating the application of human expertise through Interactive Machine Learning in robotic systems.

Research Interests

  • Machine Learning
    • Interactive Machine Learning
    • Reinforcement Learning with Black-Boxes
    • Robot Learning
  • Optimization
    • Bayesian Optimization
    • CMA-ES
  • Human-Robot Interfaces
    • Augmented Reality
    • Robot Web Tools
  • Embedded Systems in Robotics
  • Cyber Physical Systems

Teaching & Thesis Supervision

Current & Past Theses

Teaching

Contact

M.Sc. Nikolaus Feith
Doctoral Student supervised by Univ.-Prof. Dr. Elmar Rueckert since July 2022.
Montanuniversität Leoben
Franz-Josef-Straße 18, 
8700 Leoben, Austria 

Phone:  +43 3842 402 – 1901 (Sekretariat CPS)
Email:   nikolaus.feith@unileoben.ac.at 
Web Work: CPS-Page
Chat: WEBEX

Publications

2024

Feith, Nikolaus; Rueckert, Elmar

Integrating Human Expertise in Continuous Spaces: A Novel Interactive Bayesian Optimization Framework with Preference Expected Improvement Proceedings Article

In: IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR 2024), IEEE 2024.

Links | BibTeX

Integrating Human Expertise in Continuous Spaces: A Novel Interactive Bayesian Optimization Framework with Preference Expected Improvement

Feith, Nikolaus; Rueckert, Elmar

Advancing Interactive Robot Learning: A User Interface Leveraging Mixed Reality and Dual Quaternions Proceedings Article

In: IEEE International Conference on Ubiquitous Robots (UR 2024), IEEE 2024.

Links | BibTeX

Advancing Interactive Robot Learning: A User Interface Leveraging Mixed Reality and Dual Quaternions