Nikolas Tsagkas

I am a PhD candidate, at the MAPS Lab and the School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh, sponsored by the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, under the supervision of Prof. Chris Xiaoxuan Lu. My research objective is to improve the real-time spatial perception in robotics, utilizing Neural Fields.

In November 2021, I completed with distinction the Artificial Intelligence master’s programme at the University of Edinburgh. For my master’s dissertation project I worked on a novel inference and learning algorithm for generative capsule models, under the supervision of Prof. Chris Williams.

In 2019, I was awarded the Diploma of Electrical and Computer Engineering, from the University of Patras, in Greece (graduated 4th in my class out of 202 students – GPA: 8.11 out of 10). I completed my ECE Diploma thesis under the supervision of Prof. Athanassios Skodras, researching the use of CNNs for real-time hand-gesture recognition via sEMG signals. Our work was presented at the IISA’19 international conference.

Moreover, working under the supervision of Prof. Konstantinos Moustakas at the VVR group, I researched the use of Haptics in self-driving vehicles, by taking part in the 2nd Student Challenge in Automotive Haptics, at the WHC’19 in Tokyo, Japan, where our team received the “Best Student Innovation Challenge Award”.