Sethu Vijayakumar is the Director of the Institute of Perception, Action & Behavior (IPAB) in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh and an associate member of the Institute for Adaptive & Neural Computation (ANC).  Since 2007, he holds the Microsoft/Royal Academy of Engineering Senior Research Fellowship in Learning Robotics. He also holds additional appointments as an Adjunct Faculty of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, a Research Scientist of the ATR Computational Neuroscience Labs, Kyoto-Japan and a Visiting Research Scientist at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Tokyo. He has a Ph.D.('98) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology. Prof. Vijayakumar held the positions of Research Assistant Professor ('01-'03) at USC and a Staff Scientist ('98-'00) at the RIKEN Brain Science Institute before this appointment. His research interest spans a broad interdisciplinary curriculum involving basic research in the fields of statistical machine learning, motor control, planning and optimization in autonomous systems and computational neuroscience.