Professor at the University of Oxford

Nick Hawes is a Professor of AI and Robotics in the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. He directs the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI), a federation of seven research groups spanning the breadth of robotics research. He is also a Tutorial Fellow at Pembroke College, and a Group Leader for AI/Robotics at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for AI and data science. Within the ORI he leads the Goal-Oriented Autonomous Long-Lived Systems (GOALS) group which performs research into sequential decision-making for autonomous systems, including robots and heterogenous multi-agent teams. From 2013 to 2017 he led the EU STRANDS project which achieved breakthroughs in long-term autonomy for mobile service robots in everyday environments. More recent highlights include the deployment of an autonomous mission planning stack on a quadruped at an active nuclear site, and on an autonomous underwater vehicle harvesting data from a sensor network. Professor Hawes is a passionate believer in public engagement, and an Academic Champion for Public Engagement with Research at the University of Oxford.