Short Biography ( ~1oo words )

 

Dr Edward Johns is the Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London, where he is also a Reader (Associate Professor). He received a BA and MEng from Cambridge University, and a PhD from Imperial College. He was then a post-doc at UCL, before returning to Imperial College as a founding member of the Dyson Robotics Lab. In 2017, he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship, and then in 2018 he was appointed as a Lecturer and founded the Robot Learning Lab. In this lab, Dr Johns and his team are currently studying efficient learning of vision-based robot manipulation skills.

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Medium Biography ( ~200 words )

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Dr Edward Johns is the Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London, where he is also a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of Computing. He is developing advanced robots that are empowered by artificial intelligence, for assisting us all in everyday environments. His expertise lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision, and he primarily studies robot manipulation: robots that can physically interact with objects using their arms and hands. His research has enabled state-of-the-art capabilities in robot learning, such as robots which can learn entirely new tasks from just a single human demonstration, and robots which can understand and solve tasks using language-based reasoning.

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Prior to founding the Robot Learning Lab, Dr Johns received a BA and MEng in Electrical and Information Engineering from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in computer vision from Imperial College. Following his PhD, he was a founding member of the Dyson Robotics Lab at Imperial College, after which he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship. Externally, he was Head of Robot Learning at Dyson in a part-time capacity, and he is on the advisory board for a number of robotics and AI startups.

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Long Biography ( ~300 words )

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Dr Edward Johns is the Director of the Robot Learning Lab at Imperial College London, where he is also a Reader (Associate Professor) in the Department of Computing. He is developing advanced robots that are empowered by artificial intelligence, for assisting us all in everyday environments. His expertise lies at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and computer vision, and he primarily studies robot manipulation: robots that can physically interact with objects using their arms and hands. His research has enabled state-of-the-art capabilities in robot learning, such as robots which can learn entirely new tasks from just a single human demonstration, and robots which can understand and solve tasks using language-based reasoning.

 

Prior to founding the Robot Learning Lab, Dr Johns received a BA and MEng in Electrical and Information Engineering from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in computer vision from Imperial College. Following his PhD, he was a post-doc at UCL for a year, before returning to Imperial College as a founding member of the Dyson Robotics Lab with Prof. Andrew Davison, where he led the robot manipulation team. In 2018, he was then awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship for his pioneering work on sim-to-real transfer and imitation learning, after which he was appointed as a Lecturer at Imperial College and founded the Robot Learning Lab. At Imperial College, he teaches graduate-level courses in reinforcement learning and robot learning.
 
Dr Johns has published over 60 peer-reviewed papers, which have over 4000 citations. In 2022, he received Imperial College's President's Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher, in 2023, he received the UK-RAS Early Career Award, and in 2024, he won the Best Conference Paper award at ICRA. Externally, he is on the advisory board for a number of robotics and AI startups, and in 2022 he was Head of Robot Learning at Dyson for a year in a part-time capacity.​