Speaker Profile

Michael Milford holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering and a Bachelor of Mechanical and Space Engineering from the University of Queensland (UQ), awarded in 2006 and 2002 respectively. After a brief postdoc in robotics at UQ, Michael worked for three years at the Queensland Brain Institute as a Research Fellow on the Thinking Systems Project. In 2010 he moved to the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to finish off his Thinking Systems postdoc, and then was appointed as a Lecturer in 2011. In 2012 Michael was awarded an inaugural Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, which provides him with a research-intensive fellowship salary and extra funding support for 3 years. In 2013 Michael became a Microsoft Faculty Fellow and lived in Boston on sabbatical working with Harvard and Boston University. Michael is currently a Senior Lecturer and Australian Research Council Future Fellow at QUT with a research focus, although he continues to teach Introduction to Robotics every year.  From 2014 to 2020 Michael will be a Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Robotic Vision.

Michael's research interests include vision-based mapping and navigation; computational modelling of the rodent hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, especially with respect to mapping and navigation, computational modelling of human visual recognition, biologically inspired robot navigation and computer vision and Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM).