Verena Vanessa Hafner Researcher in Computer Science, AI and Robotics Research Interests: Developmental robotics, joint attention, sensorimotor interaction and communication Biorobotics, navigation strategies, adaptation to the environment, adaptation of different sensory modalities

For contact details, check out my page at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Book Recommendations

R. Pfeifer and J. Bongard: How the Body Shapes the Way We Think: A New View of Intelligence (published 2006, in English)

Ralf Möller: Das Ameisenpatent. Bioroboter und ihre tierischen Vorbilder (published 2006, in German)

V.V. Hafner: Adaptive Navigation Strategies in Biorobotics: Visual Homing and Cognitive Mapping in Animals and Machines (published 2004, in English)

Publications

(check out my Google Scholar Citations page to see the currently over 1100 papers citing my publications!)

More recent publications can be found here.

2011

• Hafner, V.V., Lohse, M., Meyer, J., Nagai, Y. and Wrede, B. (Eds.)(2011), Proceedings of the Workshop on The role of expectations in intuitive human-robot interaction (at HRI 2011), Lausanne, Switzerland, March 6, 2011.
• Schillaci, G. and Hafner, V.V. (2011), Prerequisites for intuitive interaction - on the example of humanoid motor babbling, in Proceedings of the Workshop on The role of expectations in intuitive human-robot interaction(at HRI 2011), pp. 23-27.
• Berthold, O., Müller, M. Hafner, V.V. (2011), A quadrotor platform for bio-inspired navigation experiments, International workshop on bio-inspired robots, Nantes, France.
• Hafner, V.V. (2011), Roboterkörper, book chapter in Verkörperungen, André L. Blum, John Michael Krois und Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (Hrsg.), Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Preprint 416, pp. 175-181 (Kapitel 9)
• Schillaci, G., Hafner, V.V. (2011). Random Movement Strategies in Self-Exploration for a Humanoid Robot, Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2011), pp. 245-246.

2010

• Hafner, V.V., Bachmann, F. Berthold, O. , Schulz, M., Müller, M. (2010), An Autonomous Flying Robot for Testing Bio-Inspired Navigation Strategies, Proceedings of ISR/Robotik 2010, Joint conference of the 41st International Symposium on Robotics (ISR 2010) and the 6th German Conference on Robotics (ROBOTIK 2010)
• Kronemann, M.L., Hafner, V.V. (2010), LumiBots - Making Emergence Graspable in a Swarm of Robots, Proceedings of DIS 2010, The ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, Aarhus, pp. 408-411, ISBN 978-1-4503-0103-9

2009

• Hafner, V.V. and Sommer, W. (2009), Experimental setup for studying the development of tool-use on the example of object throwing, Proceedings of EpiRob09, Ninth International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics, pp. 209-210, Lund University Cognitive Studies, 146, Editors: Lola Canamero, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Christian Balkenius
• Bertsch, F.A. and Hafner, V.V. (2009), Real-time dynamic visual gesture recognition in human-robot interaction, Proceedings of Humanoids 2009, 9th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, Paris, France
• Bertsch, F.A. and Hafner, V.V. (2009), Gesture recognition as a prerequisite of imitation learning in human-humanoid experiments, Proceedings of EpiRob09, Ninth International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics, pp. 197-198, Lund University Cognitive Studies, 146, Editors: Lola Canamero, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Christian Balkenius

2008

• Hafner, V.V. and Bachmann, F. (2008), Human-Humanoid Walking Gait Recognition, Proceedings of Humanoids 2008, 8th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, pp. 598-602
• Hafner, V.V. and Kaplan, F. (2008), Interpersonal Maps: How to Map Affordances for Interaction Behaviour,
  In: E. Rome et al. (Eds.): Affordance-Based Robot Control, LNAI 4760, pp. 1-15, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
  
• Hafner, V.V. (2008), Robots as Tools for Modelling Navigation Skills - A Neural Cognitive Map Approach, In: Jefferies, M.E., Yeap, W.K. (Eds.): Robotics and Cognitive Approaches to Spatial Mapping, Series: Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, Vol. 38, pp. 315-324, ISBN: 978-3-540-75386-5

2007

• Oudeyer, P.-Y., Kaplan, F., Hafner, V.V. (2007), Intrinsic Motivation Systems for Autonomous Mental Development,
  IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Special Issue on Autonomous Mental Development, Volume: 11, Issue: 2, pp. 265-286
  
• Hafner, V.V. (2007), The AI Lab experience - How the AI Lab shaped the way I think, In: The rediscovery of intelligence, 20 years of AI - in Zurich and world-wide, Ed: Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

2006

• Hafner, V.V., Bauckhage, C., Roth, M. (2006), Applying Robotic Techniques for Behavior Recognition in Game Agents,
  Proceedings of Game-ON 2006, First International Conference on the use of Simulation and Artificial Intelligence in Commercial Computer Games, pp. 39-43
  
• Hafner, V.V. and Nagai, Y. (2006), Imitation Behaviour Evaluation in Human Robot Interaction,
  Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, pp. 175-176, Lund University Cognitive Science Studies 118
• Bauckhage, C., Roth, M., Hafner, V.V. (2006), Where am I? - On Providing Gamebots with a Sense of Location Using Spectral Clustering of Waypoints,
  Proceedings of the Workshop on Adaptive Approaches for Optimizing Player Satisfaction in Computer and Physical Games at SAB 2006, pp. 51-60
• Hafner, V.V. (2006), Complex Behaviour Recognition in Interacting Agents,
  50th Anniversary Summit of Artificial Intelligence Handbook
• Möller, S., Englert, R., Engelbrecht, K., Hafner, V., Jameson, A., Oulasvirta, A., Raake, A., Reithinger, N. (2006), MeMo: Towards Automatic Usability Evaluation of Spoken Dialogue Services by User Error Simulations,
  Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (Interspeech 2006 - ICSLP), pp. 1786-1789
• Kaplan, F. and Hafner, V. V. (2006), Information-theoretic framework for unsupervised activity classification,
  Advanced Robotics, 20:10, pp. 1087-1103
• Kaplan, F. and Hafner, V. V. (2006), The Challenges of Joint Attention,
  Interaction Studies, 7:2, pp. 135-169
  
  

2005

• Kaplan, F. and Hafner, V. V. (2005), Mapping the space of skills: An approach for comparing embodied sensorimotor organizations,
  Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL-05), pp. 129-134, Osaka, Japan
• Hafner, V. V. and Kaplan, F. (2005), Interpersonal Somatosensory Maps,
  Proceedings of the AISB 2005 Third International Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, pp. 48-53, Hatfield, UK
• Oudeyer, P.-Y., Kaplan, F., Hafner, V. V., Whyte, A. (2005), The Playground Experiment: Task-Independent Development of a Curious Robot,
  Proceedings of the 2005 AAAI Spring Symposium on Developmental Robotics, pp. 42-47, Stanford, USA
• Hafner, V. V. (2005), Cognitive Maps in Rats and Robots,
  Journal of Adaptive Behavior, special issue on "Towards Artificial Rodents", Vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 87-96, SAGE Publications
• Hafner, V. V., Kaplan, F. (2005), Learning to interpret pointing gestures: experiments with four-legged autonomous robots,
  In: Biomimetic Neural Learning for Intelligent Robots. Intelligent Systems, Cognitive Robotics, and Neuroscience. Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Subseries: Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 3575., pp. 225-234, Wermter, S., Palm, G., Elshaw, M. (Eds.) ISBN: 3-540-27440-5, Springer Verlag
  
  

2004

• 
• Hafner, V. V., Fend, M., König, P. and Körding, K. P. (2004), Predicting Properties of the Rat Somatosensory System by Sparse Coding,
  Neural Information Processing Letters and Reviews, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 11-18, ISBN 89-89453-04-6 93560
  
  
• Kaplan, F., Hafner, V. V., Whyte, A. (2004), Attention detection and manipulation between autonomous four-legged robots.
  Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL'04): Developing Social Brains
  
  
• Hafner, V. V., Kaplan, F. (2004), Learning to interpret pointing gestures: experiments with four-legged autonomous robots
  In: Palm, G. and Wermter, S., Proceedings of the KI2004 Workshop on NeuroBotics, Ulm, Germany
  
  
• Hafner, V. V. (2004), Adaptive Navigation Strategies in Biorobotics: Visual Homing and Cognitive Mapping in Animals and Machines
  PhD Thesis University of Zurich, Shaker Verlag, ISBN 3-8322-2857-8
  
  
• Kaplan, F., Hafner, V. V. (2004), The Challenges of Joint Attention,
  Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics, pp. 67-74, Lund University Cognitive Science Studies 117, Genoa, Italy
  
  
• Hafner, V. V. (2004), Agent-Environment Interaction in Visual Homing
  In: Embodied Artificial Intelligence, LNAI series, Vol. 3139, Springer Verlag, ISBN: 3-540-22484-X, pp. 180-185
  
  
• Fend, M., Bovet, S., Hafner, V. V. (2004), The Artificial Mouse - A Robot with Whiskers and Vision
  Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on Robotics (ISR 2004), Paris
  
  

2003

• Hafner, V. V., Fend, M., Lungarella, M., Pfeifer, R., König, P., Körding, K. P. (2003), Optimal coding for naturally occurring whisker deflections,
  Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Artificial Neural Networks and Neural Information Processing (ICANN/ICONIP), Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 805-812, ISSN 0302-9743, ISBN 3-540-40409-2, Istanbul
  
  
• Hafner, V.V. (2003), Evaluating cognitive maps for mobile robot navigation behaviour,
  Proceedings of the AISB'03 Symposium on "Scientific Methods for the Analysis of Agent-Environment Interaction", Aberystwyth, UK
  
  

2002

• Hafner, V. V., Kunz, H., Pfeifer, R. (2002), An Investigation into Obstacle Avoidance as an `Emergent' Behaviour from two Different Perspectives,
  Proceedings of the EPSRC/BBSRC International Workshop on Biologically-Inspired Robotics: The Legacy of W. Grey Walter, pp. 166-173, Bristol
  
  
• Lungarella, M., Hafner, V. V., Pfeifer, R., Yokoi, H. (2002), An Artificial Whisker Sensor for Robotics,
  Proceedings of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 2931-2936, Lausanne
  
  
• Lungarella, M., Hafner, V. V., Pfeifer, R., Yokoi, H. (2002), Whisking: An Unexplored Sensory Modality,
  Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB`02), MIT Press, pp. 58-59, Edinburgh
  
  
• Hafner, V. V., Salomon, R. (2002), Evolving Neural Controllers for Visual Navigation,
  Proceedings of the Fourth Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC-2002), IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Honolulu (ISBN: 0-7803-7282-4)
  
  

2001

• Hafner, V. V. (2001), Adaptive Homing - Robotic Exploration Tours,
  Adaptive Behavior, Vol. 9, Number 4, pp. 131-141, SAGE Publications, ISSN 1059-7123
  
  
• Hafner, V. V., Möller, R. (2001), Learning of Visual Navigation Strategies,
  In: Quoy, M. and Gaussier, P. and Wyatt, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the European Workshop on Learning Robots (EWLR-9), pp. 47-56, Prague
  
  

2000

• Hafner, V. V. (2000), Cognitive Maps for Navigation in Open Environments,
  Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-6), pp. 801-808, IOS Press, Venice
  
  
• Hafner, V. V. (2000), Explaining Wayfinding Behaviour and Cognitive Mapping,
  Book Review of R. G. Golledge's "Wayfinding Behavior", Psycoloquy, 11(060):3 (ISSN 1055-0143)
  
  
• Hafner, V. V. (2000), Learning Places in Newly Explored Environments,
  In: Meyer, Berthoz, Floreano, Roitblat and Wilson (Eds.), SAB2000 Proceedings Supplement Book, pp. 111-120, Publication of the International Society for Adaptive Behavior (Honolulu), Paris
  
  
• Paul, C., Hafner, V., Bongard, J. (2000), Teaching New Artificial Intelligence using Constructionist Edutainment Robots,
  GMD Workshop on Edutainment Robots, Sankt Augustin, Germany

Talks and Presentations

... and many more recently...


• Invited talk on "Bio-inspired Flying Robots" at Pecha Kucha Vol. 06, Ancienne Belgique, Brussels (16.01.2009)


• Invited talk on "Accelerometer-based Human-Behaviour Recognition", AI Lab, Universität Zürich, Switzerland (30.10.2008)


• Invited talk on "Bio-inspirierte Navigationsstrategien für Flugroboter", motodrone 2008, Finowfurt (20.09.2008)


• Invited talk on "Emergente Intelligenz" at re:publica08, Berlin (03.04.2008)


• Invited talk on "Bodymaps: Rekonstruktion durch Interaktion" at the Lauflabor, University of Jena, Germany (29.02.2008)


• Invited talk on "The Playground Experiment - an experiment in open-ended learning" at the Psychology Department, Cognitive Psychology Group, HU Berlin (7.2.2008)


• 
• Invited Talk on "Robots for Fun and Research" at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3) in Berlin (December 27-30, 2005)
  Interesting feedback to this talk!
  
  
• Invited Talk on "Interpersonal Maps and the Body Correspondence Problem" at the Dynamics and Interaction workshop, University of Glasgow (August 2-4, 2005)
  
  
• Invited Talk on "Robots: Tools or Toys? Some Answers from Biorobotics, Developmental and Entertainment Robotics" at the Artificial Intelligence Seminar Series at the University of Luxembourg (May 24, 2005)
  
  
• 
• Invited Talk on "The Challenges of Joint Attention" at the International Workshop on Processes of Communication, Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, Germany (February 9-11, 2005)
  
  
• Invited Talk on "Learning navigation strategies" at LS Kognitive Neurowissenschaft, University of Tubingen, Germany (August 13, 2003)
  
  
• Invited Talk on "Finding your way back home: Learning navigation strategies" at Sony Computer Science Laboratory, Paris, France (June 4, 2003)
  
  
• Invited Talk on "Artificial whiskers as an additional sensory modality for a navigating mobile robot" at Fraunhofer, AIS/INDY, Sankt Augustin, Germany (March 21, 2003)
  
  
• Invited Talk on Biomimetische Robotik: Navigationsstrategien bei Wüstenameisen und Robotern at the Bionics Lab, TU Berlin, Germany (November 29, 2002)
  
  
• Invited Talk on "Visual Homing in Robots and Insects" at COGS, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK (November 20, 2002)
  
  
• Poster presentation: Learning of a Visual Homing Strategy on a Mobile Robot,
  Robotics as Theoretical Biology Workshop, Edinburgh, UK (August 10th, 2002)
  
  
• Presentation of The Playground Experiment at IST 2004 in The Hague (November 15-17, 2004).

Other Scientific Activities

Cognitive Science Brown Bags
The Cognitive Science Brown Bags is a colloquium series that deals with various aspects of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. It is now maintained by Lukas Lichtensteiger.

Dagstuhl Seminar on Embodied AI, 2003
I was co-organiser of the Seminar Embodied Artificial Intelligence at Schloss Dagstuhl, Germany, July 6-11, 2003.

Program Committee member of

• Multisensory Integration and Concurrent Parallel Memory Systems for Spatial Cognition at SAB 2006
  


• Bionetics 2006 and Bionetics 2007
  
  
• IEEE International Conference on Distributed Human-Machine Systems (DHMS 2008)
  


• Curious Places: Workshop on Self-Aware Systems for Intelligent Environments at the Sixth International Conference on Pervasive Computing, Sydney, Australia, May 22, 2008
  

Teaching

University of Zurich, Switzerland:

• Neuronale Netze (summer semester 2000 and summer semester 2001)
  
  
• Chaos und Ordnung in Informationssystemen (summer semester 2000)
  
  
• Biomimetische Robotik (Biorobotics) (winter semester 2000/2001 and winter semester 2001/2002)
  
  
• Roboter und künstliche Intelligenz @ Klubschule (spring 2002)
  
  
• Seminar New AI (summer semester 2003)

TU Berlin, Germany:

• Autonome Interagierende Systeme (summer semester 2006)

HU Berlin, Germany:

• Sensomotorische Koordination und Interaktion (summer semester 2007)


• Kognitive Robotik (winter semester 2007/08)


• Navigationsstrategien in der Robotik (summer semester 2008)


• Quadrokopter Projekthalbkurs (winter semester 2008/09)


• Seminar on Foundations of Human-Robot Interaction (winter semester 2008/09)


• Kognitive Robotik (winter semester 2008/09)

And...

PhD Thesis
My thesis Adaptive Navigation Strategies in Biorobotics: Visual Homing and Cognitive Mapping in Animals and Machines (ISBN 3-8322-2857-8) has been published at Shaker Verlag.
It can now also be ordered from Amazon.de or Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.co.jp

Check out my entry in the Mathematics Genealogy Project, going back to David Hilbert, Felix Klein, and Carl Friedrich Gauss.

Master Thesis
In 1999, I received my M.Res. in CSAI * degree with Distinction from COGS, University of Sussex, UK. My thesis "Cognitive Maps for Navigation in Open Environments" is available on request.

* Master of Research in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence


Some of my earlier projects

• SASL-Compiler written in Eiffel (1997, in German) (ps.gz 63kB)
• Fuzzy ART-Map for Navigational Landmark Learning (1998) (ps.gz 224kB)
• An Introduction to Complex Numbers (1998) (ps.gz 135kB)

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Note: This page is permanently under construction..... New items are marked in red.