Course Director
Lars Kunze is a Departmental Lecturer in Robotics in the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. At ORI, he leads the Cognitive Robotics Group (CRG).
Lars is also a Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at Christ Church, a Programme Fellow of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP), and an Editor of the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence (KI Journal, Springer).
His areas of expertise lie in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). His goal is to enable robots to understand their surroundings, to act autonomously, and to explain their own behaviour in meaningful human terms. To this end, his research concerns the design and development of fundamental AI techniques for autonomous robot systems. He focusses on the combination of knowledge representation, reasoning, machine learning, and robot perception; motivated by applications in complex, real-world environments.
Lars studied Cognitive Science (BSc, 2006) and Computer Science (MSc, 2008) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and partly at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
He received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2014. During his PhD, Lars worked on methods for naive physics and common sense reasoning in the context of everyday robot manipulation. He contributed to several national, European and international projects including RoboHow, RoboEarth, and the PR2 Beta program.
In May 2013, Lars was appointed as a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science at Birmingham University. Here he worked on qualitative spatio-temporal models for perception planning and knowledge-enabled perception, contributing to the European research projects STRANDS and ALOOF.
He was a visiting researcher in the JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, Japan (Summer 2011) and the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, US (Spring 2015).
Course Director
Based in London, Ajit's work spans research, entrepreneurship and academia relating to artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT).
He is the course director of the course: Artificial Intelligence: Cloud and Edge Implementations. Besides this, he also conducts the University of Oxford courses: AI for Cybersecurity and Developing Artificial Intelligence Applications.
Ajit works as a Data Scientist through his company feynlabs - focusing on building innovative early stage AI prototypes for domains such as cybersecurity, robotics and healthcare.
Besides the University of Oxford, Ajit has also conducted AI courses in the London School of Economics (LSE), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and as part of the The Future Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
He is also currently working on a book to teach AI using mathematical foundations at high school level.
Ajit was listed in the top 30 influencers for IoT for 2017 along with Amazon, Bosch, Cisco, Forrester and Gartner by the German insurance company Munich Re.
Ajit publishes extensively on KDnuggets and Data Science Central.
He was recently included in top 16 influencers (Data Science Central), Top 100 blogs (KDnuggets), Top 50 (IoT central), and 19th among the top 50 twitter IoT influencers (IoT Institute).
His PhD research is based on AI and Affective Computing (how AI interprets emotion).
Tutor
With over 10 years of mixed reality and real-time development experience, David Menard is an industry-leader in virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) when it comes to enterprise applications.
At Unity Technologies, David oversees the technical developmentof Unity Reflect, which enables AEC (Architecture, Construction, Engineering) companies to create real-time experiences in augmented reality and virtual reality.
Prior to joining Unity, David led mixed-reality R&D efforts at the enterprise software giant, Autodesk.
Course Tutor
Rikesh leads Transport for London’s award winning market innovation activity to create new value for London by working with start-ups, corporates, academia, accelerators and venture capitalists. He was responsible for creating TfL’s first Innovation Hub which has delivered some pioneering projects. The Hub sets out the organisation’s key challenges and problem statements, bringing in the best innovators from across the world, piloting and scaling innovative solutions with the potential to commercialise, as well as establishing the right culture in the company focusing on agility and design thinking to work with market innovators who either have a new mobility product or an innovative idea to help solve an existing city challenge through new technologies by doing things better, quicker or cheaper.
Rikesh was previously responsible for TfL’s world leading open data programme which has 17,000 registered users, 700 apps powered by TfL data used by 42% of Londoners which an independent review stated that it’s worth to London is £130m per annum. He also was actively involved during the 2012 Olympic Games and TfL’s response to COVID-19.
Most recently, Rikesh has been recognised in the Top 100 Asian Stars in UK Tech in 2019 and 2020, being named one of the top five for sustainability.
Rikesh also sits on the Smart London Board to deliver the Mayor of London’s vision to make London the smartest city in the world, as well as sitting as a Non-Executive Director at the London Transport Museum on the Enterprise Board. He also sits on the Advisory Board for Nitrous and Citytech Collaborative in Chicago. In academia, he Co-Chairs the Institute of Civil Engineering Data and Digital Advisory Board as well as Guest Lecturing on Open Innovation at the Royal College of Arts.
Tutor
Ayşegül Yönet is a Senior Azure Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft and focuses on Cognitive Services, Spatial Computing and WebXR. She is a co-chair of W3C Immersive Web Working Group and Community Group working on WebXR Device APIs and a Google Developer Expert for Web Technologies. She co-hosts the San Francisco WebXR Meetup and enjoys teaching at a variety of non-profit organizations, aiming to increase diversity in the software industry.
She is the co-founder of Code4Good, an organization with the vision of helping people to contribute to open source. Previously she led Women Who Code meetups, Girl Develop It and Black Girls Code workshops and was a CTO at AnnieCannons, a bootcamp dedicated to teaching tech skills to human trafficking survivors.
Lately she enjoys creating tutorials for WebXR, AysSomething, XR Developer YouTube channels and FrontEndMasters.
Tutor
Data Scientist
Ayşe Mutlu is a data scientist working on Azure AI and devops technologies. Based in London, Ayşe’s work involves building and deploying Machine Learning and Deep Learning models using the Microsoft Azure framework (Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines).
She enjoys coding in Python and contributing to Open Source Initiatives in Python.
Senior Tutor
Digital Hive and Innovation consultant, Anglo American Plc
Marina is an Analyst Developer and Software consultant at Anglo American Plc working at the Digital Hive on innovative trading analytics and optimisation projects.
She has over 18 years’ experience in Software Engineering, Business Analysis, Data Science and full software development life cycle in a variety of business domains including Commodity trading and optimisation, Finance, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, e-commerce, e-learning, web-development.
Marina holds an MSc, with distinction, in Software Engineering from the University of Oxford and a degree in Applied Mathematics from Lomonosov Moscow State University.
In February 2020, Marina completed the course "Data science for internet of things" from the University of Oxford.
Senior Tutor
Associate Professor, Department of Electronics, SRCASW, University of Delhi
Amita Kapoor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronics, SRCASW, University of Delhi, and has been actively teaching neural networks and artificial intelligence for over twenty years, and she is an active member of ACM, AAAI, IEEE, and INNS.
Amita completed her masters in Electronics in 1996 and her Ph.D. in 2011.
During her Ph.D she was awarded a prestigious DAAD fellowship to pursue a part of her research work in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany. Amita was awarded the Best Presentation Award at the Photonics 2008 international conference.
Amita has more than 50 research publications in international journals and conferences, and has co-authored four books, including the best-selling “Deep learning with TensorFlow2 and Keras” with Packt Publications.
Passionate about using her skills for the betterment of society and humankind, Amita spends her spare time in various AI-related IoT and healthcare open source projects. She was recently awarded the Intel AI Spotlight Award 2019 for her work on the early detection of Acute Myeloid Leukemia using AI.
Amita’s present research areas include Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Deep Reinforcement Learning, and Robotics.
Senior Tutor
Digital Solutions Architect, Metrobank
Anjali is a Digital Solutions Architect at Metrobank, where she helps to deliver advanced technology driven business solutions around diverse themes of Internet Banking, Mobile App, Business banking, and Open banking/PSD2, using agile methodology.
She has over 16 years of IT experience and worked across Banking, Telecom and logistics domains, from inception to the delivery of complex projects.
Anjali is passionate about AI and Machine learning and completed the course "Data science for internet of things" in February 2019 from the University of Oxford.
