Welcome to my homepage at the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab at the University of Southern California.

Bio:

In 2001, I received the Doctorandus (=MSc.) degree in Cognitive Science and Engineering (now renamed to Artificial Intelligence) at the University of Groningen, where I also studied Biology for two years (as prerequisite for CS&E). I received my Doctorate from the Technische Universität München in 2007. My research focuses on using action models to generate and optimize sequences of actions for robots. Robots acquire predictive models of their actions by interacting with the world, and generalizing over their experiences with machine learning. The methods and algorithms I develop apply to a wide range of robotics domains, such as mobile manipulation (AR'09), navigation (JAIR'08), and multi-robot coordination (RASJ'09). After my PhD, I continued this line of research in the CogMan project ("Cognitive Models of Everyday Manipulation Tasks"), part of the CoTeSys cluster of excellence. In 2009, I was also a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International in Kyoto, Japan. In August 2009, I came to the CMCL-Lab with a Research Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG), where I use Dynamic Movement Primitives as a representation for optimizing sequences of motor primitives.

As the machine learning algorithms that I use for robotics have proven to be very powerful in the context of face model fitting (PAMI'08) as well, this has become a second main thread in my research. Initially, I investigated model-based fitting techniques applied to range images for architectual modelling at the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour at the University of Edinburgh, as well as the Instituto de Sistemas e Robótica at the Instituto Superior Técnico from 2000-2001. More recently, I have turned to face-model fitting in cooperation with the Computer Vision and Image Understanding Group at the Technische Universität München

My full CV is here.

Publications:

Are listed here.

Address:

Ronald Tutor Hall, RTH-417
3710 S. Mc.Clintock Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90089

E-mail:
Phone: +1 (213) 740 6717
Fax: +1 (213) 740 1510

Freekuently Asked Question: The not uncommon dutch name "Freek" is pronounced "Frrrake" (with a Spanish-style "r" as in "burro"). Don't worry, I'm not fussy about this: over the years abroad I have also learned to respond to "Frank", "Fred", "Vague", "Flake", "Flag", "Freoch", and "Freak" (actually, one of the institutes I worked at always addressed letters to "Dr. Freak", though at the time I was neither). Contrary to the well-known English meaning, the original lesser-known Dutch meaning is "powerful protector". For completeness: "Stulp" means "humble abode".