Giacomo Spigler

I am Assistant Professor at the Department of Intelligent Systems of Tilburg University, where I work on various topics in AI for Robotics, especially Deep Reinforcement Learning and Imitation Learning.
I am interested in artificial (general) intelligence and in building intelligent artificial life. In particular, I am interested in deep reinforcement learning for robotics, meta-learning, and innate evolutionary priors.

Current Position:

• (January 2022 - current) Tenured Assistant Professor (UD1) in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence of Tilburg University.
    Co-director of the AI for Robotics Lab (AIR-Lab) and of the MindLabs Robotics & Avatars Lab.
• (June 2019 - December 2021) Tenure-track Assistant Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence of Tilburg University.
• (2019 - current) Research fellow at Siks.
• (2019 - current) Mentor at LeadTheFuture, italian network of excellence in STEM fields.

Education:

• Ph.D. at the Department of Psychology (Computational Neuroscience), The University of Sheffield, with a Biohybrid Network full Scolarship, 2018. Supervisor: Dr. S.P. Wilson. Dissertation title "How can plasticity of lateral interactions affect cortical representation?"     PDF
• M.Sc. (Distinction) Cognitive Science (Computational Neuroscience and Neuroinformatics), The University of Edinburgh, 2014 (Informatics UK/EU Master's Scolarship). Supervisor: Prof. J. Bednar. Dissertation title: "Neural modelling of the McCollough Effect in color vision."     PDF
• March - April 2012 : research internship @ CBCL, MIT.
• B.Sc. Computer Engineering, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, 100/100 magna cum laude, 2012.
• B.Sc. Computer Engineering, University of Pisa, 110/110 magna cum laude, Dec 2012. Dissertation title: "A WTA Competitive Learning Algorithm For The Development of Cortical Receptive Fields."     PDF

Invited Talks:

• Deep Reinforcement Learning in Robotics: Bridging the Gap between Simulation and Real-world Applications, invited talk at the ``Contributions to Control Systems'' seminar series, Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany. May 2024.
• Sim2Real : bridging the gap between simulation and real world physics for robot learning, Pre-PLANCKS Morocco 2024, University of Moulay Ismail, Meknes, Morocco. March 2024.
• AI revolution & Robotics: towards highly-autonomous agricultural robots, one-day symposium ``Agricultural Resources, Leadership and Artificial Intelligence'' organized at the Italian Embassy, Den Haag, The Netherlands. October 24th, 2023.
• End-to-end robot learning and the Tilburg Hand, TAISIG Talks 15, Tilburg, The Netherlands (\url{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0d-ZqLUuRo}. August 2022.
• Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Bioinformatics, Healthcare, and Protein Folding, 1st Synthetic Biology Conference (SynBio) in Nicosia, Cyprus, organized by the University of Nicosia, the Institute of Neurology and Genetics, the European University and the University of Cyprus. March 2019.