Michail Theofanidis
Research Scientist II
Group: Research Staff
817-987-7165
Biography
Michail Theofanidis is a research scientist in the Automation & Intelligent Systems group in UTARI. His role is the design and analysis of machine learning and control algorithms for autonomous robotic platforms. In the past, Michail Theofanidis was a postdoctoral fellow at Boston University in the research group of Prof. Awad Lou and Prof. Roberto Tron. As a postdoctoral researcher at BU, he was part of a team that developed a novel, multimodal distributed system for home-based medical surveillance and treatment for frail older adults. In his research, he explored the potential of Visual-Inertial Filtering techniques paired with Deep Learning for 3D human pose estimation and activity recognition.
Dr. Theofanidis received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Arlington, where he worked in the Heracleia laboratory. As part of the lab, he developed an instrument for personalized rehabilitation therapy for individuals suffering from motor disabilities and cognitive impairments. The system was composed of a depth camera that tracks the motion of the patient’s upper limb and a robotic manipulator that challenges or supports the patient with repetitive exercises. Later in his Ph.D. studies, he worked on learning from imitation paradigms that enable motor skill learning for manipulators. The epicenter of his thesis involves learning end-to-end visuomotor policies by combining deep neural networks and dynamic movement primitives.
Subject matter: Automation & Intelligent Systems