Dr Viktor Schmuck is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Social AI & Robotics Laboratory. He primarily works on movement and gesture generation in connection to socially aware robotic applications. His work on socially aware navigation has been recognised with an Interdisciplinarity of Research Award at the NMES 3rd Year Research Competition 2022. He also received the NVIDIA CCS Best Student Paper Award Runner Up at IEEE FG 2021 for his publication on social group detection. His most recent work focuses on nonverbal gesture generation, specifically role-based gesture generation, demonstrated at the GENEA Challenge 2023 and ACM ICMI 2023.

He is also an active member of the Toyota HSR community, and one of the key figures behind Toyota’s UK and International advertisements involving the HSR robot – having worked on promotional material for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics with the UK Paralympics Team, the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics for Channel4, promotional content for Toyota Denmark and Stockholm Museum of Technology, and a Paris’24 Paralympics event. He was also awarded Teacher of the Year 2019 by the Study Board of Media Technology at Aalborg University, and Qualified to 5 of 6 selection rounds of the ESA and HUNOR joint Astronaut selection process.

 

Research

• Machine Learning for Perception and Robotics
• Human-Robot Interaction
• Socially-aware interaction
• Robot navigation
• Non-verbal gesture generation