picture credits: Matthias Heyde
Prof. Dr. sc. nat. Verena V. Hafner
Juniorprofessorin für Kognitive Robotik
Institut für Informatik, Mathematisch-Naturwissenschaftliche Fakultät II, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Prof. Dr. Verena V. Hafner is Junior Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and head of the Cognitive Robotics Group at the Department of Computer Science. She holds a Masters with distinction in Computer Science and AI from the University of Sussex, UK, and a PhD from the Artificial Intelligence Lab, University of Zurich, Switzerland. Before moving to Berlin, she worked as an associate researcher in the Developmental Robotics Group at Sony Computer Science Labs in Paris, France. She has published more than 50 papers in renowned scientific journals, books and peer-reviewed conference proceedings. She is PI in a graduate school on sensory computation in neural systems (DFG, 2010-2015), PI in the graduate school METRIK (DFG, 2010-2015), and PI in the EU Integrated Training Network INTRO on interactive robotics (EU FP7, 2010-2014). She has been reviewer for the EU, journals and conferences. Her research interests include sensorimotor interaction and learning, joint attention, communication, and behaviour recognition.

Forschungsschwerpunkte / Research Topics

  • Cognitive Robotics
    Joint Attention, Behaviour Recognition, Sensorimotor Learning, Affective Computing
  • Developmental Robotics
    Sensorimotor Development, Bootstrapping of Skills
  • Biorobotics
    Spatial Cognition, Navigation, Neural Modelling

Functions / Projects