Dr Tobias Fischer

Biography

Research Overview
Dr Tobias Fischer is a Senior Lecturer (US: Associate Professor) and Chief Investigator at QUT's Centre for Robotics. He is also a recipient of the prestigious Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) by the Australian Research Council. He is dedicated to advancing the field of robotics by providing robots with perceptual abilities allowing safe, intelligent interactions with humans in real-world environments. His multi-disciplinary research spans robotics, computer vision, and artificial intelligence.

Tobias Fischer's DECRA project
The project "Adaptive and Efficient Robot Positioning Through Model and Task Fusion" is an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship, awarded to Dr Tobias Fischer in 2023. DECRA Fellows are “outstanding early-career researchers with demonstrated capacity for high-quality research and emerging capability for leadership and supervision”. The DECRA supports the Fellow and a team of PhD students for 3 years. In this case, the ARC contributes a $462,000 fellowship, with another $300,000 cash funding from QUT, supporting two PhD student scholarships with substantial top-up components and research support including equipment and travel funds.

Research Experience
In addition to being an ARC DECRA Fellow, Dr Fischer is the Principal Investigator of a grant entitled "Spike-based Visual Place Recognition using Intel's Loihi" funded by the Intel Neuromorphic Computing Lab. He is further co-investigator of an Amazon Research Award on "Complementarity-Aware Multi-Process Fusion for Long Term Localization". Dr Fischer was a co-author and named lead researcher of two applications for the Samsung Global Research Outreach program, which resulted in 200,000 USD commercial funding. In addition, he has been working on major research projects funded by European Union FP7 and H2020 programs, and the Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI).

His papers have received three best paper awards and two best poster awards:

• My first-author paper "Computational Modeling of Embodied Visual Perspective-taking" received the 2023 IEEE Transactions on Cognitive & Developmental Systems Outstanding Paper Award
• Scarlett Raine's paper entitled "Point Label Aware Superpixels for Multi-species
  Segmentation of Underwater Imagery" won the SAGE HDR Student Publication Prize Competition 2022 (Faculty of Engineering)
• Samsung AI Forum 2018 for the paper entitled "Context-aware Deep Feature Compression for High-speed Visual Tracking" (appeared at CVPR2018)
• IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision 2019 Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild for the paper entitled "RT-BENE: A Dataset and Baselines for Real-Time Blink Estimation in Natural Environments"

Career History
Before joining QUT as a Research Fellow in January 2020, Dr Fischer was a postdoctoral researcher in the Personal Robotics Lab at Imperial College London. He received a PhD from Imperial College with the thesis topic: "Perspective Taking in Robots: A Framework and Computational Model" in January 2019. The thesis has been awarded the Queen Mary UK Best Thesis in Robotics Award 2018 and the Eryl Cadwaladr Davies Prize for the best thesis in the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at Imperial College 2018. Since September 2020, Tobias is a professionally registered Chartered Engineer.

Dr Fischer received the M.Sc. degree in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Edinburgh, in August 2014, and a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany, in 2013. He wrote his Bachelor thesis in John Tsotsos' Lab for Active and Attentive Vision, at the York University, Canada.

From February 2012 until August 2014, he was a scholarship holder at the prestigious German National Academic Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes).

Web Links

• Personal website
• Google Scholar profile
• LinkedIn
• Twitter @TobiasRobotics