Stefan Schaal was a founding director of the Max Planck Insitute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, where he led the Autonomous Motion Department from 2012 to 2018. He was simultaneously a Professor of Computer Science, Neuroscience, and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California in the USA. He was also an Invited Researcher at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratory in Japan, where he held an appointment as Head of the Computational Learning Group during an international ERATO project, the Kawato Dynamic Brain Project (ERATO/JST). Before joining USC, Dr. Schaal was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, an Invited Researcher at the ATR Human Information Processing Research Laboratories in Japan, and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and at the Department of Kinesiology of the Pennsylvania State University.

Dr. Schaal's research interests include topics of statistical and machine learning, neural networks, computational neuroscience, functional brain imaging, nonlinear dynamics, nonlinear control theory, and biomimetic robotics. He applies his research to problems of artificial and biological motor control and motor learning, focusing on both theoretical investigations and experiments with human subjects and anthropomorphic robot equipment.

Dr. Schaal has co-authored over 400 papers in refereed journals and conferences. He is a co-founder of the "IEEE/RAS International Conference and Humanoid Robotics", and a co-founder of "Robotics Science and Systems", a highly selective new conference featuring the best work in robotics every year. Dr. Schaal served as Program Chair at these conferences and he was the Program Chair of "Simulated and Adaptive Behavior" (SAB 2004) and the "IEEE/RAS International Conference on Robotics and Automation" (ICRA 2008), the largest robotics conference in the world. Dr. Schaal is has also been an Area Chair at "Neural Information Processing Systems" (NIPS) and served as Program Committee Member of the "International Conference on Machine Learning" (ICML). Dr. Schaal serves on the editorial board of the journals "Neural Networks", "International Journal of Humanoid Robotics", and "Frontiers in Neurorobotics". Dr. Schaal is a member of the German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Society For Neuroscience, the Society for Neural Control of Movement, the IEEE, and AAAS.

artificial intelligence robotics computational neuroscience machine learning