Muthukumar Pandaram

University of Innsbruck. Intelligent and Interactive Systems. ELLIS. Bethge Lab.

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Innsbruck, Austria

I am currently an ELLIS PhD student at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. My research focuses on robot perception and learning. I am passionate about neuro-inspired representation learning. I am primarily part of the Intelligent and Interactive Systems research group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck. My primary supervisor is Prof. Justus Piater and I am co-supervised by Assoz.Prof. Antonio Rodríguez-Sánchez. My ELLIS co-supervisor is Prof. Matthias Bethge from the University of Tübingen.

I did my Master’s in Computational Neuroscience at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin (Degree jointly awarded by the Technical University of Berlin and Humboldt University of Berlin) and Bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore, India.

I have been fortunate to work with different labs across the world. I have worked as a graduate research assistant with Prof.Oliver Brock at the Robotics and Biology Lab, TU Berlin. Furthermore, I did my Master thesis with Prof. MD. Andreas Horn at the Network Stimulation Lab at the Charité University Hospital, Berlin. Additionally, during my Bachelor’s, I have done research internships at the National University of Singapore, University of Leeds, UK and McMaster University, Ontario, Canada (funded by MITACS).

news

Jan 24, 2026 I gave a talk on our work - Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks at AAAI 2026, Singapore. Please watch it here
Nov 08, 2025 Our work on Dynamic Sparsity: Challenging Common Sparsity Assumptions for Learning World Models in Robotic Reinforcement Learning Benchmarks got accepted to AAAI 2026 for oral presentation.
Oct 01, 2024 Started as an ELLIS PhD student at the University of Innsbruck.
Oct 01, 2020 Started my Master’s Studies in Computational Neuroscience at the BCCN Berlin