Born in 1968, in Bremen, Germany, Justus H. Piater is of German nationality. He studied at the Technische Universität Braunschweig and then at the Magdebourg School Of Computer Science, which he left in 1994 with a degree in computer science, then gaining a Master Of Science (M.Sc.) in 1998 and a Ph.D in Computer Science (2001) from the University Of Massachusetts in the United States. It was there that his passion for robotics was born.

After his doctorate in the United States, he turned up in France (‘speaking very little French,’ he admits) for two years of research in the GRAVIR-IMAG laboratory at the National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automatics (Grenoble). ‘In no hurry to return to Germany’ at the end of these two years, he applied almost everywhere in Francophone countries and landed at Liège in 2002 as a lecturer. ‘I’ve always found it interesting to discover new countries, new horizons,’ he explains. ‘My children, born in the United States, brought up in Germany and having lived in Belgium, are now trilingual. It’s very fortunate.’ In 2008-2009 Julius Piater took a year’s sabbatical to carry out research at the Max Planck Institute of Bio-cybernetics in Tubingen, Germany.

Selection of publications

Renaud Detry, Nicolas Pugeault, Justus Piater, A Probabilistic, Framework for 3D Visual Object Representation. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 31 (10), pp. 1790–1803, 2009.

Renaud Detry, Emre Başeski, Mila Popović, Younes Touati, Norbert Krüger, Oliver Kroemer, Jan Peters, Justus Piater, Learning Object-specific Grasp Affordance Densities. International Conference on Development and Learning, 2009.

Dirk Kraft, Renaud Detry, Nicolas Pugeault, Emre Başeski, Justus Piater, Norbert Krüger, Learning Objects and Grasp Affordances through Autonomous Exploration. Computer Vision Systems: Seventh International Conference, pp. 235–244, 2009. Springer LNCS 5815.

Dirk Kraft, Emre Başeski, Mila Popović, Anna Batog, Anders Kjær-Nielsen, Norbert Krüger, Ronald Petrick, Christopher Geib, Nicolas Pugeault, Mark Steedman, Tamim Asfour, Rüdiger Dillmann, Sinan Kalkan, Florentin Wörgötter, Bernhard Hommel, Renaud Detry, Justus Piater, Exploration and Planning in a Three-Level Cognitive Architecture. International Conference on Cognitive Systems, 2008.