Dr. Christian LAUGIER received the PhD and the "State Doctor" degrees in Computer Science from Grenoble University (France) in 1976 and 1987 respectively. He is a First class Research Director at INRIA (French National Insitute for Research on Computer Science and Control). He is the Scientific Leader of the e-Motion project-team common to INRIA Rhône-Alpes and to the LIG (Laboratory of Informatics of Grenoble), and he is in charge of the Scientific Relations with Asia & Oceania at the International Affairs Department of INRIA. Since January 2007 he is also Deputy Director of the LIG Laboratory involving about 500 people. From 1987 to 1992 he was Deputy Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (LIFIA) of Grenoble. He has been an invited researcher at MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1987) and at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (1998).
His current research interests mainly lie in the areas of Motion Autonomy, Intelligent Vehicles, Decisional Architectures and Bayesian Reasoning. He has directed or co-directed more than 30 PhD theses, and he has authored or co-authored numerous international publications in these areas. He has co-edited several books, e.g. recent Springer STAR books on "Autonomous navigation in Dynamics Environments" and on "Probabilistic Reasoning and Decision Making in Sensory-Motors Systems"; he has also co-edited several special issues of scientific journals (IJRR, Advanced Robotics, JFR, IEEE Transactions on ITS, RIA, IJVAS). In 1997, he was awarded the Nakamura Prize for his contributions on "Intelligent Robots and Systems". In 2006, the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on "Intelligent Transport Systems" he is co-chairing with Urbano Numes and Alberto Broggi has been awarded the Prize for the "most active Technical Committee of IEEE RAS". In addition to his research and teaching activities, he participated in the start-up of four industrial companies in the fields of Robotics, Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, and Bayesian Programming tools. He also served as Scientific Consultant for the ITMI, Aleph Technologies, and Probayes companies.
Dr. Christian Laugier is a member of several scientific national and international committees such as the Steering/Advisory Committee of the IEEE/RSJ IROS conference, the International Committee of the Field and Service Robotics conference, or the Advisory Committee of the Asian ICARCV conference. He is also co-Chair of the IEEE RAS TC on "Autonomous Ground Vehicles and Intelligent Transportation Systems". He is also regularly involved in the International Program Committees or Organizing Committees of the major international conferences in Robotics and Intelligent Vehicles (e.g. IEEE ICRA, IEEE/RSJ IROS, IEEE IV, IEEE ITSC). In particular, he was General Chair of IROS'97 and of FSR'07, Program Chair of IROS'02 and of IROS'08, Regional Program Chair of IROS'00, IROS'10 and IV'06, Special Session Chair of IEEE ICRA'98, and Publication co-Chair of IEEE ICRA'00.