Patrick van der Smagt is director of the open-source Volkswagen Group Machine Learning Research Lab in Munich and research professor also at Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Informatics. He is focussing on probabilistic deep learning for time series modelling, optimal control, robotics, and quantum machine learning. He is also a faculty member of the LMU Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences. He is the founding head of a European industry initiative on certification of ethics in AI applications (etami). Patrick previously directed a lab as professor for machine learning and biomimetic robotics at the Technical University of Munich, while leading the machine learning group at the research institute fortiss. he founded and headed the Assistive Robotics and Bionics Lab at the DLR Oberpfaffenhofen. Ages ago he did his PhD and MSc at Amsterdam’s universities on neural networks in robotics and vision. Besides publishing numerous papers and patents on machine learning, robotics, and motor control, he has won a number of awards, including the 2013 Helmholtz-Association Erwin Schrödinger Award, the 2014 King-Sun Fu Memorial Award, the 2013 Harvard Medical School/MGH Martin Research Prize, and best-paper awards at machine learning and robotics conferences and journals. He was founding chairman of a non-for-profit organisation for Assistive Robotics for tetraplegics and co-founder of various tech companies.
Selected publications
Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm, Hochberg, L.R., Bacher, D., Jarosiewicz, B., Masse, N.Y., Simeral, J.D., Vogel, J., Haddadin, S., Liu, J., Cash, S.S., Van Der Smagt, P. and Donoghue, J.P., 2012. Nature, 485(7398), pp.372-375.
Flownet: Learning optical flow with convolutional networks. Dosovitskiy, A., Fischer, P., Ilg, E., Hausser, P., Hazirbas, C., Golkov, V., Van Der Smagt, P., Cremers, D. and Brox, T., 2015. Proceedings of the IEEE international conference on computer vision (pp. 2758-2766).
Surface EMG in advanced hand prosthetics. Castellini, C. and van der Smagt, P., 2009. Biological Cybernetics, 100(1), pp.35-47.
