Dr Xun Wang

My Story

I am Co-Director of the Social Robotics Studio in the Innovation and Enterprise Research Lab in the Centre of Artificial Intelligence, and a Chancellor's Post Doctoral Fellow in the School of Software, Faculty of Engineering and IT, at the University of Technology Sydney. 

I completed two Bachelor of Science degrees (Advanced Science in Astrophysics and Computer Science) at UNSW (1995 - 2000) and a Masters of IT at UTS before completing my PhD at UTS on Risk Management in 2013.

Prior to PhD study, I spent more than eight years working in commercial software companies, working on some of unique software systems including a novel satellite ground station control system, state-of-the-art Massive Online Role Playing Game (MMORG) backend server system.

Computer Science is a theoretical and practice-based discipline, and my work brings them together. I work on the theory of risk, risk modeling in decision making based non-monotonic logic and possibillistic models, and I translate theoretical results into working systems. I am currently working towards implementing my PhD work in robotics, in particular social robotics. During my PhD, I was a key member of UTS robot soccer team and participated in three RoboCup competitions (2008, 2010 and 2011).

My recent and current research projects have been focusing on Human Robot Interaction in human centred environments. How people are able to understand and interpret robot behaviours and gestures, for example, pointing; how safely and reliably can robots operate in a human centred physical environment and how to build trust between robots and human with transparency and active engagement.

Over the years, I have published a wide range of software as open source including an interactive robot software development environment for rapid software prototyping/experimentations and system integration; an innovative Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM) algorithm and its implementation that allows robots to detect and map out glass walls with laser sensors. With this algorithm, an advanced mobile robot can, for the first time, reliably and safely navigate within a modern buildings that feature large glass walls. My SLAM algorithm has been adopted by several robotics groups including the University of Tokyo.

In the area of teaching and learning, I have lead iOS project subjects in the School of Software and I have co-led the iOS Developer University Program for the Univeristy of Technology Sydney since 2009.

In 2015 I redeveloped one of popular undergraduate subject iOS Application Development (42889). I developed the subject course materials from scratch, successfully managed and delivered the subject in 2016. In addition, I mentored several tutors for the subject, and I was delighted that one of them was able to deliver the subject as the main lecturer in 2017.

During 2014 and 2015, I was a member of the core team that designed, developed and delivered intermediate and advanced data analytics exec ed workshops for over 5000 CBA employees as a part of my industry engagement work.

I am currently on a one-year secondment assignment to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia as a Senior Robotics Research Engineer, developing commercial applications of social robotics for research purposes and continuing my human-robot interaction research projects in real world environments. 

Copyright 2017 Xun Wang 
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