About

Hello & Welcome to my personal academic website! Let me tell you a little bit about myself. My name is Manuel Bied and I'm passionate about robotics. Topics that interest me the most include robot learning and motor skills like (dexterous) manipulation and grasping. Especially, approaches that combine these two topics, and thus, enable robots to learn new motor skills, excite me. These new skills can either be learned autonomously or (interactively) from humans.

In 2022 I received a Ph.D. on robotics from Sorbonne Université (SU). During my Ph.D. I worked on robot learning in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) at the Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (isir) advised by Prof. Mohamed Chetouani. My research was conducted within ANIMATAS, an international project of the type Marie-Skłodowska-Curie-Actions Innovative Training Network (MSCA-ITN) funded by the European Union. The project does not only provide an outstanding international network of researchers, but also offered the possibility to participate in numerous workshops and summer/winter schools on a variety of different topics. In addition to doing my research I also taught and supervised students at SU.

Before joining isir I received a M.Sc. and B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Technische Universität Darmstadt in 2017 and 2014 respectively. During my Master's I did various projects at the intelligent autonomous systems group (ias) headed by Prof. Jan Peters. These projects include most importantly my Master's Thesis on temporal constraints in bi-manual manipulation and Learning-From-Demonstration. I did my thesis, as well as an internship on computer vision for a small humanoid robot before, at Honda Research Institute - Europe (HRI-EU).

In my free time I enjoy social dance, more specifically a French dance called "Danse 4 Temps" (also called "Rock 4 Temps"). Dance comprises a variety of complex motor skills requiring a lot of effort to be mastered. In addition, it combines these skills with feeling for rhythm and offers creative ways to express oneself. In particular, social dance is a great way to communicate, to learn about- and to adapt to your dance partner. Furthermore, I enjoy learning and speaking French. Since I now speak fluently, I'm not as actively learning as I used to. However, I still enjoy discovering new expressions a native French speaker would use, in particular slang. Learning new curiosities about a language and culture is a lot of fun! Ah - and cooking- I nearly forgot cooking. Here's a picture of a dish I made - it's my German interpretation of a traditional French dish called "boeuf bourguignon".