I have a multi-disciplinary background in Mechanical Engineering and Automation (B.Eng. at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, CN), Robotics (M.Sc. with Distinction at King’s College London, UK), and Material Perception (Ph.D. at TU Delft, NL).

I have always been curious and fascinated by the cognitive abilities of our human minds. Trained as an engineer, I steered my path and became slightly “deviated” from my peers. Today, I conduct inter-disciplinary research in Cognitive Robotics that may be invoved with Robotics, Computer Science, Industrial Design, Psychology, and Neuroscience. My expertises and research interests cover but are not limited to the following topics: Computer Vision, Computer Graphics, 3D Modelling&Rendering, (Computer-aided) Intelligent Manufacturing, Human Computer/Robot Interaction, Interactive UX/UI Design, Mid-/High-level Human Vision, Visual Attention, Decision Making, Ecological Optics and Visual Perception of Materials, Ligh, Shapes, etc.

Back to the year 2012/13, during my M.Sc., under the supervision of Dr. Spratling, I developed a CNN that modelled area V1 to solve the correspondence problem in Stereo Vision. In November 2013, I joined the Delft Perceptual Intelligence Lab (pi-lab.eu, in the section of Human Information Communication Design (HICD), Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering) to pursue the Ph.D. My Ph.D. project was a part of the EU FP7 Marie Curie Initial Training Network (ITN) PRISM – Perceptual Intelligence of Illumination, Shape and Material. It comprised nine leading research insitutes and industrial partners, and offered me the privilege to meet and collaborate with the world’s most renowned experts in Visual Perception, and more importantly, in the emerging field of Material Perception. For a summary of my Ph.D., please see here.

From December 2018 to June 2019, I worked as Postdoctoral Researcher for Procter & Gamble (DE) in a Consumer Knowledge research project with a focus on Multisensory Perception. Later, in December 2019 I joined the Computational Psychology Lab (University of Birmingham, UK) as Research Fellow to work with Dr. Dietmar Heinke. There, I started to integrate my expertise from both the human and computational worlds, with a focus on Cognitive Robotics. For exmaple, together with our collaborator from Brown University, we built a computational model for characteristics in attentional target selection and reach actions, that mimics human visual attention and movements, provided mechanistic explanations to the dynamic interactions between attentional selection and action selection.

August 2023, I joined the School of Robotics at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) as Assistant Professor.

Contact me via fan [dot] zhang [at] xjtlu [dot] edu [dot] cn