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Jan Peters
Professor Technical University of Darmstadt
| Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
47 YEARS OLD
Jan Peters is a renowned full professor (W3) for Intelligent Autonomous Systems at the Computer Science Department of the Technische Universitaet Darmstadt since 2011. He is also the department head of the research department on Systems AI for Robot Learning (SAIROL) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) since 2022. He is a founding research faculty member of the Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence. Jan Peters has received several awards, including the Dick Volz Best 2007 US Ph.D. Thesis Runner-Up Award, the Robotics: Science & Systems - Early Career Spotlight, the INNS Young Investigator Award, and the IEEE Robotics & Automation Society's Early Career Award. He has also been awarded numerous best paper awards. Jan Peters was appointed an IEEE Fellow in 2019, an ELLIS Fellow in 2020, and an AAIA Fellow in 2021.
Despite being a faculty member at TU Darmstadt only since 2011, Jan Peters has mentored several outstanding young researchers into successful careers. These include new faculty members at leading universities in the USA, Japan, Germany, Finland, and Holland, postdoctoral scholars at top computer science departments (including MIT, CMU, and Berkeley), and young leaders at top AI companies (including Google, Facebook/Meta, Amazon, and Boston Dynamics).
Jan Peters holds multiple degrees from TU Munich, FernUni Hagen, the National University of Singapore (NUS), and the University of Southern California (USC). He has studied Computer Science, Electrical, Mechanical, and Control Engineering and holds four Master's degrees in these disciplines and a Computer Science Ph.D. from USC. Jan Peters has also conducted research at institutions such as DLR, TU Munich, the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, the Advanced Telecommunication Research Center (ATR), and Siemens Advanced Engineering in Singapore. He has led research groups on Machine Learning for Robotics at the Max Planck Institutes for Biological Cybernetics (2007-2010) and Intelligent Systems (2010-2021).