Yiannis Aloimonos

Professor Aloimonos leads the Perception and Robotics Group at the University of Maryland. His research is devoted to the principles governing the design and analysis of real-time systems that possess perceptual capabilities, for the purpose of both explaining animal vision and designing seeing machines. Such capabilities have to do with the ability of the system to control its motion and the motion of its parts using visual input (navigation and manipulation) and the ability of the system to break up its environment into a set of categories relevant to its tasks and recognize these categories (categorization and recognition). The work is being done in the framework of Active and Purposive Vision, a paradigm also known as Animate or Behavioral Vision.

Since the early 2000 he has been working on the integration of sensorimotor information with the conceptual system, bridging the gap between signals and symbols. This led to the introduction of language tools into the Robotics community. During the past five years his research is supported by the European Union under the cognitive systems program in the projects POETICON and POETICON++ , by the National Science Foundation under the Cyber Physics Systems Program in the project Robots with Vision that find objects and by the National Institues of Health in the project Human Activity Languages.