Dr Tobias Fischer
Dr Tobias Fischer had been a postdoctoral researcher in the Personal Robotics Lab from October 2018 until January 2020. He conducts interdisciplinary research at the intersection of computer vision, cognitive robotics and computational cognition. His research goal is to provide robots with perceptional abilities that allow interactions with humans in a human-like manner. To develop these perceptional abilities, Tobias believes that it is useful to study the principles used by the human visual system. He uses these principles to develop new computer vision algorithms and validates their effectiveness in intelligent robotic systems.
Tobias received his Ph.D. degree from Imperial College London (also within the Personal Robotics Lab) in January 2019 with the thesis topic: "Perspective Taking in Robots: A Framework and Computational Model". The thesis has been awarded the Queen Mary UK Best Thesis in Robotics Award 2018 and the Eryl Cadwaladr Davies prize 2018. The Ph.D. was funded under the FP7 WYSIWYD project and the Samsung Global Research Outreach program. He received the M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence (Intelligent Robotics specialist area) from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2014, and a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering (Cognitive systems specialist area) from Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany, in 2013. He wrote his Bachelor thesis in John Tsotsos’ Lab for Active and Attentive Vision, at the York University, Toronto, Canada.
From February 2012 until August 2014, he was a scholarship holder at the prestigious German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes), which covered full tuition fees plus a living allowance. From October 2011 to September 2012, he received the Germany Scholarship (Deutschlandstipendium).
More information can be found on his personal web page.
Publications
Please see my Google Scholar profile for up-to-date publications (list below last updated in January 2020).
Journals
→ T. Fischer and Y. Demiris (2019) Computational modelling of embodied visual perspective-taking. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS 2019), to appear
→ T. Fischer, J.-Y. Puigbo, D. Camilleri, P. Nguyen, C. Moulin-Frier, S. Lallee, G. Metta, T. J. Prescott, Y. Demiris, and P. F. M. J. Verschure (2018) iCub-HRI: A software framework for complex human robot interaction scenarios on the iCub humanoid robot. Frontiers in Robotics and AI (FRAI 2018), vol. 5, no. 22, pp. 1-9
→ H.J. Chang, T. Fischer, M. Petit, M. Zambelli, and Y. Demiris (2018) Learning Kinematic Structure Correspondences Using Multi-Order Similarities. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI 2018), vol. 40, no. 12, pp. 2920-2934
→ T. Fischer*, C. Moulin-Frier*, M. Petit, G. Pointeau, J.-Y. Puigbo, U. Pattacini, S. C. Low, D. Camilleri, P. Nguyen, M. Hoffmann, H. J. Chang, M. Zambelli, A.-L. Mealier, A. Damianou, G. Metta, T. J. Prescott, Y. Demiris, P. F. Dominey, and P. F. M. J. Verschure DAC-h3: A Proactive Robot Cognitive Architecture to Acquire and Express Knowledge About the World and the Self. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS 2018), vol. 10, no. 4, pp. 1005-1022
*: equal contributions
→ T. Fischer*, M. Petit*, and Y. Demiris (2016) Lifelong Augmentation of Multi-Modal Streaming Autobiographical Memories. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS 2016), vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 201-213
*: equal contributions
Conferences
→ Buizza C, Fischer T, and Demiris Y (2020) Real-Time Multi-Person Pose Tracking using Data Assimilation. IEEE Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV 2020), pp: 449-458
→ Fischer T, Chang HJ, and Demiris Y (2018) RT-GENE: Real-Time Eye Gaze Estimation in Natural Environments. European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV 2018), pp: 339-357
→ Nguyen P, Fischer T, Chang HJ, Pattacini U, Demiris Y, and Metta G (2018) Transferring Visuomotor Learning from Simulation to the Real World for Manipulation Tasks in a Humanoid Robot. IEEE/RSJ Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2018), pp: 6667-6674
→ Choi J, Chang HJ, Fischer T, Yun S, Lee K, Jeong J, Demiris Y, and Choi JY (2018) Context-aware Deep Feature Compression for High-speed Visual Tracking. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2018), pp: 479-488
→ Choi J, Chang HJ, Yun S, Fischer T, Demiris Y, and Choi JY (2017) Attentional Correlation Filter Network for Adaptive Visual Tracking. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2017), pp: 4807-4816
→ Fischer T, Demiris Y (2016) Markerless Perspective Taking for Humanoid Robots in Unconstrained Environments. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2016), pp: 3309-3316
→ Chang HJ, Fischer T, Petit M, Zambelli M, and Demiris Y (2016) Kinematic Structure Correspondences via Hypergraph Matching. IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2016), pp: 4216-4225
Refereed Workshop Papers
→ Cortacero K, Fischer T, and Demiris Y, RT-BENE: A Dataset and Baselines for Real-Time Blink Estimation in Natural Environments. ICCV 2019 Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild (full proceedings paper).
→ Fischer T, and Demiris Y, A Computational Model for Embodied Visual Perspective Taking: From Physical Movements to Mental Simulation. CVPR 2018 Workshop on Vision Meets Cognition.
→ Kristan M et al., The sixth Visual Object Tracking VOT2018 challenge results. ECCV 2018 Workshop on Visual Object Tracking.
→ Fischer T*, Petit M*, and Demiris Y, Towards the Emergence of Procedural Memories from Lifelong Multi-Modal Streaming Memories for Cognitive Robots. IROS 2016 Workshop on Machine Learning Methods for High-Level Cognitive Capabilities in Robotics.
*: equal contributions
→ Zambelli M, Fischer T, Petit M, Chang HJ, Cully A, and Demiris Y, Towards Anchoring Self-Learned Representations to Those of Other Agents. IROS 2016 Workshop on Bio-Inspired Social Robot Learning in Home Scenarios.
Theses
→ Fischer T (2019) Perspective Taking in Robots: A Framework and Computational Model. Ph.D. Thesis, Imperial College London
→ Fischer T (2014) Model of all known spatial maps in primary visual cortex. M.Sc. Thesis, University of Edinburgh
