Ali Shafti


Head of Human-Machine Understanding, Cambridge Consultants

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I lead a team of specialists in AI, Psychology, Cognitive and Behavioural Sciences at Cambridge Consultants, to create next generation systems that can truly understand and support users in dynamic, strenuous environments. 

I have a PhD in Robotics from King's College London, with focus on human-robot collaboration. I followed this with a PostDoc and Research Fellowship at Imperial College London, engaging in machine intelligence and motor neuroscience research and their application within the physical human-robot collaboration realm. 

I have more than 10 years' experience in research and development within human-machine interaction and collaboration. My research has resulted in various publications covering novel human-machine interaction applications as well as fundamental research into human motor learning and behavioural analytics.

Some video demos of my work in academia (more here):

Real-World Human-Robot Collaborative RL

A setup for real-world human-robot reinforcement learning of a fully  collaborative motor task, in the form of a marble-maze game.

Gaze Prediction for Autonomous Driving

Prediction of human visual attention helps with the training of autonomous driving agents - attention masking helps the agent "see what matters".

Learning Explainable Robotic Manipulations

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning is used to create more explainable representations of the manipulating agent's understanding of world dynamics.

Gaze-based HRI + Arm Inverse Kinematics

The system is aware of the human user's arm kinematics - this allows for full control of the human user's hand orientation, whilst keeping the interaction comfortable.

Collaboration

I am interested in collaborations within the above research topics, as well as other topics that fit in with my expertise. Do get in touch!