Short bio

Jens with iiwa

Jens Kober is an associate professor at TU Delft, Netherlands. He is member of the Cognitive Robotics department (CoR) and the TU Delft Robotics Institute.

Jens is the recipient of the Robotics: Science and Systems Early Career Award 2022 and the IEEE-RAS Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation 2018. His Ph.D. thesis has won the 2013 Georges Giralt PhD Award as the best Robotics PhD thesis in Europe in 2012.

Jens was an assistant professor at TU Delft (2015-2019), first at the Delft Center for Systems and Control (DCSC) and later at CoR. He worked as a postdoctoral scholar (2012-2014) jointly at the CoR-Lab, Bielefeld University, Germany and at the Honda Research Institute Europe, Germany.

From 2007-2012 he was working with Jan Peters as a master's student and subsequently as a Ph.D. student at the Robot Learning Lab, Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Empirical Inference Department (formerly part of the MPI for Biological Cybernetics) and Autonomous Motion Department. Jens has graduated in Spring 2012 with a Doctor of Engineering “summa cum laude” from the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group, Technische Universität Darmstadt.

Jens holds degrees (MSc equivalent) in control engineering from University of Stuttgart and in general engineering from the École Centrale Paris (ECP).

He has been a visiting research student at the Advanced Telecommunication Research (ATR) Center, Japan and an intern at Disney Research Pittsburgh, USA.

Jens is an ELLIS Scholar and IEEE Senior Member. Jens served as co-chair of the IEEE-RAS TC Robot Learning (2016-2021), as the Virtual Conference Arrangements Chair for Robotics: Science and Systems 2020, as a Program Chair for the Conference on Robot Learning 2020, as the Finance Chair for the International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics 2021, as associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and as editorial board member of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. He currently serves as a Local Arrangements Chair for Robotics: Science and Systems 2024, Secretary of the Robot Learning Foundation, as Member of the International Advisory Board - CIIRC - Czech Technical University in Prague, as board member of the ELLIS Unit Delft, as senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, as associate editor for the IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, as editor for the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, as well as area chair/associate editor for numerous conferences. He has served as reviewer for most well-known journals and conferences in the fields of machine learning and robotics.

Old website: Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and IAS, Technische Universität Darmstadt.