Dr Guido BUGMANN was born in 1953 and has two children. He studied Physics at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. In 1986 he completed a PhD on "Fabrication of photovoltaic solar cells with a-Si:H produced by anodic deposition in a DC plasma". He has then worked at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne on the development of a measurement system using an ultra-sound beam and neural networks to measure the size of air bubbles in bacterial cultures. In 1989 he joined the Fundamental Research Laboratories of NEC in Japan and modelled the function of biological neurons in the visual system. In 1992 he joined Prof. John G. Taylor at King's College London to develop applications of the pRAM neuron model and develop a theory of visual latencies. In 1993 he joined the group of Prof. Mike Denham at the University of Plymouth (UK) where he developed artificial vision systems for robots, investigated path-planning and spatial memory, and worked on robot programming using spoken instructions. Currently, he models fast learning from instructions and works on humanoid robots for competitions. He supervises PhD students and teaches neural computation and natural language interfaces at undergraduate and postgraduate level. He is programme manager of the MSc Robotics and the MSc Robotic Technology.

Human-Robot Communication using Natural Language, Artificial Vision for Robot Navigation, Planning, Brain Modelling and Neural Networks, Personal Robotics.