David Howard

David Howard, B.Sc, M.Sc, Ph.D. leads the Robotic Design and Interaction Group and is a Principal Research Scientist in the Cyber Physical Systems program at CSIRO, Australia's national science body.  

He received his BSc in Computing from the University of Leeds in 2005, and the MSc in Cognitive Systems at the same institution in 2006. In 2011 he received his PhD from the University of the West of England. He completed his first postdoctoral term in neuroevolutionary memristor networks at the same institution in 2013, before moving to CSIRO in Australia to complete his second postdoctoral term in the application of evolutionary algorithms to unmanned aerial vehicles.  

He subsequently built his career on the computational design of soft robots from 2016 – present.  He leads multiple projects at the intersection of soft robotics, evolutionary machine learning, and the computational design of novel physical objects. He currently leads the AI4Design portfolio and the Soft Robotics research program. His interests include nature-inspired algorithms, learning, autonomy, soft robotics, the reality gap, and evolution of form. His work has been featured in local and national media, and has been published in ACM, IEEE, and Nature journals.

David is associate editor for the Robotics Reports journal, area chair for the Conference on Robotic Learning (CoRL), program chair for ACM GECCO, and a member of the IEEE TC on Soft Robotics – Working Group on Reproducibility.

He is a member of ACM and IEEE.  He is a member of the Program Committee for ACM GECCO and reviewer for that conference for over 10 years.  He is an avid proponent of education, STEM, and outreach activities.

• AI-Based Design of Industrial Components for Next-Gen Industry
  Generative machine learning is poised to revolutionise the design of a range of sectors where rational design has long been the de facto approach: where design is practically a time...
• Autonomous Soft Robot Design
  The emerging field of soft robotics presents a new paradigm for robot design in which “precision through rigidity” is replaced by “cognition through compliance.”...
• Embodied Intelligence and Morphological Computing in Robotics
  Embodied intelligence is a vital and relevant philosophy that explains the emergence of natural intelligence, as aptly demonstrated by the rich array of flora and fauna in our world.  In this...
• Robotic Simulation, Modelling, and the Reality Gap
  The use of simulators in robotics research is widespread, underpinning the majority of recent advances in the field. There are now more options available to researchers than ever before,...