Who are you and what do you do? With whom are you collaborating (Partner)?
I’m João, a Ph.D. candidate at the TU Darmstadt. I develop machine learning algorithms to make robots more capable of interacting with the world around them.
My industry partner is Volkswagen AG, namely the Volkswagen Group Innovation department, which explores new technologies for future applications in VW products and services.
Since when are You a participant at Software Campus what do you expect from Software Campus?
My project started officially in May 2024, but the journey at the Software Campus started already in March 2023 when I first applied to the program.
From the Software Campus I expect to learn and develop on two fronts. First, I want to improve my project management skills. Second, I want to apply what I’ve been learning over the recent years to an impactful project.
What is your IT-Project about – core topic – and how could it be used in the long run?
My project is called “ROBOSTRUCT – Learning Robot Manipulation with Deep Generative Structured Models”.
The recent advances in computer vision and large language models have shown that even though large amounts of data are crucial for these methods to succeed, there are also inductive biases that make these models work so well. For instance, in computer vision it is common to have a convolutional neural network to process images, or in natural language to use a transformer architecture to model sequences of words. In robotics we also need data, but most importantly we need meaningful inductive biases to learn more efficiently. This project is about finding which inductive biases we can (and should) integrate into learning systems targeted for robotics.
The algorithms developed in this project will help future robots to be more intelligent and able to learn faster, and most importantly, to adapt quickly to new tasks they never saw before.
Which app/technical invention is more than essential to you?
Definitely, the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) makes my work much funnier and easier, since with it I can implement and test new ideas much faster than with a CPU.
Next to your job and Software Campus, what makes your heart beat faster?
Going downhill on a mountain bike!
Source language of this interview: English
