Sethu Vijayakumar

Vijayakumar's articles on Incremental Online Learning in high dimensions, Natural Actor-Critic and other robot learning related publications have been cited[11] over 10000 times in academic papers and he is the recipient of the IEEE Transactions of Robotics (IEEE-TRO) King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award 2013.

[12] After a PhD[13] in computer science and engineering from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, during which he also worked as a research scientist at the Kawato Dynamic Brain Project in ATR, Kyoto, Vijayakumar became a postdoctoral fellow in the Laboratory for Information Synthesis, RIKEN Brain Science Institute, Saitama, Japan working with Professor Shun'ichi Amari.

He then headed to the University of Southern California[14] as a presidential postdoctoral fellow with Professor Stefan Schaal and subsequently became a research assistant professor (2001–2003) in the Department of Computer Science at USC, Los Angeles.

Vijayakumar is an active science communicator, giving public talks and media interviews.

In 2015 the University of Edinburgh awarded him its annual Tam Dalyell Prize for Excellence in Engaging the Public with Science[17] and in 2016 he presented a series of robot demonstrations at the television launch[18] of BBC micro:bit live lessons.