Justus Piater

Timeline

1. 1989–1998

   Diplom and a Fulbright fellowship

   He studies computer science at TU Braunschweig and Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg, finishing his Diplom in 1994. As a Fulbright fellow, he moves to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he earns an M.Sc. in computer science in 1998.

2. 2000–2001

   Visual feature learning at Amherst

   At ICML in 2000, he and Roderic Grupen present a framework that learns features for visual discrimination from a sequence of training images. He completes his Ph.D. in computer science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2001.

3. 2000–2010

   From INRIA to Liège

   From 2000 to 2002, he works as a postdoctoral research scientist and Marie Curie fellow at GRAVIR-IMAG, INRIA Rhône-Alpes, in France. He joins the Université de Liège in Belgium as an assistant professor of computer science in 2002 and becomes an associate professor in 2007. He spends the 2008–09 academic year as a visiting scientist in Bernhard Schölkopf's Department of Empirical Inference at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen.

4. 2010

   Professor at Innsbruck

   In September 2010, he becomes professor of computer science with a focus on intelligent systems at the University of Innsbruck. There he leads the Intelligent and Interactive Systems group, whose research centers on making robots learn to perceive and act with understanding.

5. November 2013

   Robots that learn from people

   During European Robotics Week in November 2013, his group opens its robotics lab to the public and shows a robot that learns from human guidance to grasp objects and to screw a workpiece onto a threaded bolt. The robot estimates object poses from a 3D object model and a Kinect depth sensor, and 120 school students visit the lab.

6. 2014–2019

   Faculty dean and journal editor

   From 2014 to 2017, he serves as dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, Computer Science and Physics at Innsbruck. He is also an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Robotics from 2015 to 2019.

7. 2019–2022

   Founding the Digital Science Center

   In 2019, he becomes founding head of the Digital Science Center, an interfaculty unit that bundles the digitalization of research at Innsbruck. In February 2022, he starts an FWF project on learning social affordances for human-robot interaction, scheduled to end in December 2026.

8. December 2025

   Head of the Digital Science Center

   In December 2025, as professor of computer science and head of the Digital Science Center, he co-signs a position paper in which 40 researchers call for more political and scientific support for digital and data science. He also leads the Intelligent and Interactive Systems group and is an ELLIS Fellow in the Robot Learning: Closing the Reality Gap! program.