Dr. Burhan Hafez

I moved to the University of Southampton as New Frontiers Fellow/Tenure Track Assistant Professor in January 2024, and this page will no longer be updated. My new homepage is here.

Links

• mbhafez.com
• ResearchGate
• Google Scholar
• GitHub

Research Interests

• Machine Learning
• Reinforcement Learning
• Robot Learning
• Cognitive Robotics

Projects

• 2020-Present TRR-169 "Cross-Modal Learning"
• 2016-2020 Neural Network-based Robotic Grasping via Curiosity-driven Reinforcement Learning (NeuralGrasp)

Service

• Reviewer (a list of verified peer reviews available on publons):
          - Neural Computing & Applications
          - Neurocomputing 
          - International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics
          - IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
          - IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics
          - IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'17, '20, '21, '22)
          - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA '23)
          - IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids '22)
          - IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics
            (ICDL-EpiRob'20)

• Sub-Reviewer:
           - ICDL-EpiRob (2017, 2019), IJCNN (2018, 2019), ICANN (2018, 2019), ICONIP (2014)

• PC member
           - IEEE RAS Summer School on Multi-Robot Systems (MRSSS 2016), Singapore, June 6-10, 2016

Selected Publications

• X. Zhao, C. Weber, M.B. Hafez, and S. Wermter, "Impact Makes a Sound and Sound Makes an Impact: Sound Guides Representations and Explorations", in the 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), to appear. Kyoto, Japan. (48% Acceptance Rate).
  
  
• M.B. Hafez and S. Wermter, "Behavior Self-Organization Supports Task Inference for Continual Robot Learning", in the 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 6716–6723, Prague, Czech Republic, 2021 (45% Acceptance Rate).
  
  
• M.B. Hafez, C. Weber, M. Kerzel, and S. Wermter, “Improving Robot Dual-System Motor Learning with Intrinsically Motivated Meta-Control and Latent-Space Experience Imagination,”Robotics and Autonomous Systems, vol. 133, pp. 103630, 2020.
  
  
• M.B. Hafez, C. Weber, M. Kerzel, and S. Wermter, “Efficient Intrinsically Motivated Robotic Grasping with Learning-Adaptive Imagination in Latent Space,” in 9th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob), pp. 240–246, Oslo, Norway, 2019.
  
  
• M.B. Hafez, C. Weber, M. Kerzel and S. Wermter, “Curious Meta-Controller: Adaptive Alternation between Model-Based and Model-Free Control in Deep Reinforcement Learning,”in IEEE International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN), pp. 1–9, Budapest, Hungary, 2019.
  
  
• M.B. Hafez, C. Weber, M. Kerzel and S. Wermter, “Deep Intrinsically Motivated Continuous Actor-Critic for Efficient Robotic Visuomotor Skill Learning,” Paladyn, Journal of Behavioral Robotics, vol. 10, no. 1, pp. 14–29, 2019. 
  
  
• M.B. Hafez, M. Kerzel, C. Weber and S. Wermter, “Slowness-based neural visuomotor control with an Intrinsically motivated Continuous Actor-Critic,”in 26th European Symposium on Artificial Neural Networks, Computational Intelligence and Machine Learning (ESANN), pp. 509–514, Bruges, Belguim, 2018.
  
  
• M.B. Hafez, C. Weber and S. Wermter, “Curiosity-Driven Exploration Enhances Motor Skills of Continuous Actor-Critic Learner,”in 7th Joint IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning and on Epigenetic Robotics (ICDL-EpiRob), pp. 39–46, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017.
  
  
• M.B. Hafez and C.K. Loo, “Topological Q-learning with Internally Guided Exploration for Mobile Robot Navigation,” Journal of Neural Computing and Applications, vol. 26, no. 8, pp. 1939–1954, 2015.
  
  
• M.B. Hafez and C.K. Loo, “Curiosity-based Topological Reinforcement Learning,”in 2014 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC), pp. 1979–1984, San Diego, CA, USA, 2014.