Dr Hooman Samani

Biography

Dr Hooman Samani is a creative roboticist specialising in creative interdisciplinary AI-driven social service robotics. He is reader and course leader of creative robotics at the University of the Arts London, Creative Computing Institute. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA).
Throughout his career, he has held various academic and industry positions, including as a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Hertfordshire, UK; Lecturer in Machine Learning and AI for Robotics at the University of Plymouth, UK; Associate Professor and founder and director of the AIART Lab (Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Technology Laboratory) at National Taipei University of Taiwan; Visiting researcher at the MIT Media Lab, USA; Research Fellow at the Keio-NUS CUTE Centre, a joint research centre between the National University of Singapore and Keio University of Japan; Engineer at Posco in South Korea, and Robotics Researcher at Philips in the Netherlands and Fraunhofer in Germany. He holds a PhD in Robotics from the National University of Singapore.
He has contributed to more than 100 publications in the field of robotics, comprising peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, and books. His books explore emerging fields of robotics, including Creative Robotics, Robotics for Pandemics, Cognitive Robotics, and Lovotics: Loving Robots. He actively contributes to various robotics related journals and conferences, serving as an editorial board member, organising committee member, workshop organiser, reviewer, and author. He has also gained valuable industry experience in various R&D projects in different industrial sectors.
He has been featured in international media such as Discovery Channel, New Scientist, Wired, BBC, CNN, CBS, CBC, Huffington Post, Le Figaro, Spiegel, Arte and Reuters for his pioneering work in robotics such as Lovotics and Kissenger. He has participated in and won several international RoboCup competitions and has been recognised as a global talent in robotics by the UK Royal Academy of Engineering.
Hooman is an advocate of the philosophy that “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” He relishes the serendipity of travelling the world without (much) planning, as a practical application of SLAM (Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping) and Reinforcement Learning (Taking actions in an environment to maximise the notion of cumulative reward). In his free time, he plays the guitar when he feels like it, tennis when he doesn't, and dabbles in yoga, tai chi, meditation, football and swimming when they don't quite hit the right note.


WEBSITE:
hoomansamani.com