Fellowship
Carl von Linde Junior Fellow
Appointment
2010
Institution
University of Tübingen
Department
Media Informatics
Host
Michael Beetz
Focus Group
Cognitive Technology
Alexandra Kirsch received her diploma in computer science from TUM in 2003. She worked as a research and teaching assistant at TUM between 2003 and 2007 and received her doctoral degree. Afterwards, she worked as a management consultant at Booz & Co. In 2008 she returned to TUM as a senior research scientist at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group in the Faculty of Informatics and a leader of the independent Junior Research Group “Planning for Adaptive Robot Assistance” in the Excellence Cluster Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys). Since April 2012 Alexandra Kirsch is an assistant professor at the Media Informatics Department of the University of Tübingen.
Alexandra Kirsch investigates control mechanisms for autonomous robots based on methods from Artificial Intelligence with the aim to develop flexible, adaptive robots, whose behavior is understandable for humans and allows a close collaboration between humans and robots. The central idea in her research is that intelligent robots need different kinds of knowledge about the world, in particular models about how the world evolves, how the robot's actions change the world, and how humans usually act. For acquiring and updating such models while the robot is working, Alexandra Kirsch has developed the Robot Learning Language (RoLL), which allows a robot to acquire experience and execute learning problems automatically. She explores how these models can be used in plan-based robot control for action selection, failure detection and adaptation to human needs. In the context of interaction methods with humans, she collaborates with psychologists and neuroscientists for model acquisition and the execution of joint human-robot planning tasks.