Members
Members of the AIRO group
On this page, you can find the current AIRO members, with their additional contact information: feel free to reach out!
Academic staff
Prof. Francis wyffels, PhD
Prof. Joni Dambre, PhD
Prof. Tony Belpaeme, PhD
Senior researchers
Andreas Verleysen, PhD
Dries Marzougui, PhD
Mathieu De Coster, PhD
Thomas Lips, PhD
Tom Neutens, PhD
Researchers
Danial Forouhar
Edger Rutatola
Eva Verhelst
Giulio Antonio Abbo
Hiba Dafaane
Louis Adriaens
Maria José Pinto
Matthias Pex
Natacha Gesquière
Raman Talwar
Rasim Mehdiyev
Remko Proesmans
Robbe Depickere
Sven Van Geyt
Thomas Van Acker
Toon Vandendriessche
Willem Lapage
Wouter Bogaert
Yuyuan Wu
Vacancies
We 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.
There are currently no vacancies. But feel free to reach out to us! We can assist you in applying for a personal scholarship to complete a PhD at AIRO.
Graduated doctoral students
| Graduate | Year | Supervisors | Dissertation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tanguy Cazalets, PhD | 2026 | Joni Dambre, Francis wyffels | Hebbian Architecture Generation for Improved Representations in Reservoir Computing |
| Dries Marzougui, PhD | 2026 | Francis wyffels, Dominique Adriaens | Bridging Biology and Robotics through Physics Simulation |
| Thomas Lips, PhD | 2026 | Francis wyffels, Andreas Verleysen | Semantic Keypoint Representations for Robotic Manipulation |
| Peter De Roovere, PhD | 2026 | Francis wyffels, Rembert Daems | High-Precision 6D Pose Estimation for Flexible Industrial Automation |
| Ruben Janssens, PhD | 2026 | Tony Belpaeme, Thomas Demeester | Visually Grounded Adaptive Social Dialogue for Robots |
| Yi Liu, PhD | 2026 | Francis wyffels, Andreas Verleysen | Learning-Based Approaches for Robotic Manipulation with Everyday Items |
| 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 |