Prof. Dr. Jan Peters

Jan Peters is a full professor (W3) for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universität Darmstadt and, at the same time, he is the dept head of the research department on Systems AI for Robot Learning (SAIROL) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI). He is also is a founding research faculty member of The Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence.

Jan Peters graduated from the University of Hagen in 2000 with a Diplom-Informatiker (German M.Sc. in Computer Science) with a focus on artificial intelligence and from Munich University of Technology (TU Muenchen) in 2001 with a Diplom-Ingenieur Elektrotechnik (German M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering), majoring in automation & control. In 2000-2001, he spent two semesters as visiting student at National University of Singapore. Subsequently, he moved to University of Southern California (USC) where he completed another M.Sc. in Computer Science with a focus on Machine Learning and a M.Sc. in Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering with a major in nonlinear dynamics. During his studies, Jan Peters has been a visiting research student at the Department of Robotics at the German Aerospace Research Center in Germany, at Siemens Advanced Engineering in Singapore and at the Department of Humanoid Robotics and Computational Neuroscience at the Advanced Telecommunication Research (ATR) Center in Japan.

From 2001 to 2007, he was a graduate research assistant at the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles, USA, where Jan has been working with Stefan Schaal, Sethu Vijayakumar (now at U. Edinburgh, UK), and Firdaus Udwadia (Department of Mechanical Engineering). Jan Peters received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California (USC). Chris Atkeson (Robotics Institute at CMU) and Gaurav Sukhatme also guided him to his thesis. In 2011, Jan Peters’ PhD Thesis received the Dick Volz Best 2007 US PhD Thesis Runner Up Award based on thesis quality and thesis impact. Jan remains affiliated with the CLMC Lab as an invited researcher. After graduating from USC, Jan Peters became a full-time Senior Research Scientist and Robot Learning Group Leader in the Empirical Inference Department of Bernhard Schoelkopf at the Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in 2007-2011 and at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems since 2011. In 2011, Jan Peters joined the Technische Universität Darmstadt as a full professor (W3) founding the Intelligent Autonomous Systems lab. From 2010 until 2021, he was also an adjunct senior research scientist at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, where he used to head the interdepartmental Robot Learning Group between the departments of Empirical Inference and Autonomous Motion. In 2022, he became the department head of the research department on Systems AI for Robot Learning (SAIROL) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz, DFKI).