members

Members of AIRO at IDLab - Ghent University

If you want to reach an individual member of the group, send them an email on firstname.lastname@ugent.be.

academic staff

Prof. Tony Belpaeme
Prof. Joni Dambre
Prof. Francis wyffels

senior researchers

Dr. Andreas Verleysen
Dr. Mathieu De Coster
Dr. Tom Neutens

researchers

Chen Fang
Danial Forouhar
Dries Marzougui
Edger Rutatola
Eva Verhelst
Giulio Antonio Abbo
Louis Adriaens
Maria José Pinto
Matthias Pex
Natacha Gesquière
Peter De Roovere
Raman Talwar
Rasim Mehdiyev
Remko Proesmans
Robbe Depickere
Ruben Janssens
Sven Van Geyt
Tanguy Cazalets
Thomas Lips
Thomas Van Acker
Toon Vandendriessche
Willem Lapage
Wouter Bogaert
Yi Liu
Yuyuan Wu

current visiting members

  • Sandro Oliveira, University of Porto

past visiting members

  • Dr. Ioannis Lefkos, University of Macedonia, Greece
  • Dr. Riddhi Das, IIT Genova
  • Paulo Cardoso, IST Lisbon
  • Giulia Pusceddu, IIT Genova
  • Martina de Eccher, University of Göttingen
  • Fatih Sivridag, University of Göttingen

vacancies

  • PhD vacancy on social robots and AI

  • We also welcome open applications in the context of large behavioural models for robot helpers (computer science or informatics), advanced robot sensing (electrical engineering), and bio-inspired robotics (computer science or informatics). Contact Francis for more information.

graduated doctoral students

Graduate Year Supervisors Dissertation
Axel Willekens, PhD 2025 Francis wyffels, Simon Cool, Jan Pieters A Robot Taskmap Operation Framework to Support Precision Crop Farming
Jarne Van den Herrewegen, PhD 2025 Francis wyffels, Tom Tourwé Self-Supervised Learning with 3D Objects
Qiaoqiao Ren, PhD 2025 Tony Belpaeme, Francis wyffels The Social and Affective Touch in Human–Robot Interaction: Multisensory, Contextual, and Embodied Perspectives
Stefan Iacob, PhD 2025 Joni Dambre, Panayiota Poirazi Impact of Axonal Delays in Reservoir Computing
Victor-Louis De Gusseme, PhD 2025 Francis wyffels, Andreas Verleysen Towards Robots for Domestic Laundry
Rembert Daems, PhD 2025 Guillaume Crevecoeur, Francis wyffels, Tolga Birdal Learning from Video in Continuous Time Using Physics Priors and Fractional Noise
Seppe Hermans, PhD 2025 Peter Van Petegem, Francis wyffels Building Minds by Solving Problems: Exploring CT and STEM Integration in Vocational Education
Pieter Wolfert, PhD 2024 Tony Belpaeme, Francis wyffels Co-Speech Gestures: Evaluation and Generation
Mathieu De Coster, PhD 2024 Joni Dambre, Mieke Van Herreweghe Neural Sign Language Recognition and Translation: Towards Sign Language Applications Powered by Artificial Intelligence
Maxim Bonnaerens, PhD 2023 Joni Dambre, Matthias Freiberger Resource-Efficient Deep Learning for Computer Vision
Tom Neutens, PhD 2022 Francis wyffels, Kris Coolsaet Physical computing in primary and secondary education: techniques and tools for teaching and assessment
Andreas Verleysen, PhD 2022 Francis wyffels, Joni Dambre Learning robotic cloth manipulation
Olivier Pieters, PhD 2022 Francis wyffels, Tom De Swaef, Michiel Stock Reservoir computing with plants
Gabriel Urbain, PhD 2021 Francis wyffels, Joni Dambre Biologically inspired locomotion of compliant robots
Iryna Korshunova, PhD 2020 Joni Dambre, A. Gretton BRUNO: exchangeable deep learning models of predictive distributions
Luthffi Ismail, PhD 2020 Francis wyffels, Tony Belpaeme, F. A. Hanapiah Improvement of child-robot interaction for children diagnosed with cognitive impairments
Matthias Freiberger, PhD 2020 Joni Dambre, Peter Bienstman Scaling up integrated photonic reservoirs towards low-power high-bandwidth computing
Patricio Astudillo, PhD 2020 Joni Dambre, Peter Mortier Cardiovascular medical image analysis with deep learning
Fréderic Godin, PhD 2019 Wesley De Neve, Joni Dambre Improving and interpreting neural networks for word-level prediction tasks in natural language processing
Lionel Pigou, PhD 2018 Joni Dambre, Mieke Van Herreweghe Gesture and sign language recognition with deep learning
Jonas Degrave, PhD 2018 Francis wyffels, Joni Dambre Incorporating prior knowledge into deep neural network controllers of legged robots
Thibault Verhoeven, PhD 2017 Joni Dambre, Pieter-Jan Kindermans, Pieter van Mierlo Brain-computer interfaces with machine learning: a symbiotic approach
Cesar Vandevelde, PhD 2017 Jelle Saldien, Francis wyffels Study on the design of DIY social robots
Sander Dieleman, PhD 2016 Joni Dambre, Benjamin Schrauwen Learning feature hierarchies for musical audio signals
Aäron van den Oord, PhD 2015 Joni Dambre, Benjamin Schrauwen Deep architectures for feature extraction and generative modeling