Scientific objectives. Our research focuses on two main themes:

(1) Machine Perception and Robot Learning

We aim to develop intelligent systems capable of perceiving complex, dynamic environments, interacting with them, and learning from these interactions. Key open scientific questions include:

• Generalization: How can we enable embodied systems to generalize across situations, environments, and tasks?
• Data Efficiency: How can we achieve human-like learning efficiency, where embodied systems learn from only a few examples?
• Shared Learning: How can learning experiences be shared and accumulated across different embodied systems to improve scalability, accuracy, and robustness beyond what an individual system can achieve alone?

Applications: Breakthrough progress on these problems will have profound implications on our everyday lives as well as science and industry, with smart assistive robots that automatically learn new skills from the Internet, safer cars that autonomously navigate in difficult changing conditions, or intelligent glasses that help people navigate never seen before environments.

(2) AI for Protein Engineering

We develop machine-learning models to tackle real-world challenges in protein engineering and drug discovery. Key open scientific questions include:

• Protein Dynamics & Interactions: How can we model and engineer protein dynamics (JACS Au) and protein-protein interactions (ICLR)?
• Enzyme Characterization: How to automatically characterize enzymes and predict outputs of enzymatic reactions (bioRxiv)?
• Molecule Discovery: How to identify new molecules from mass spectrometry data in metabolomics (NeurIPS, Nature Biotechnology)?

This research is conducted in collaboration with molecular biology experts, including Jiri Damborsky and his team at Loschmidt Laboratories, Masaryk University, Brno, and Tomas Pluskal from IOCB Prague.

Applications: Breakthrough progress on these problems could lead to a deeper understanding of Alzheimer’s disease mechanisms or the development of new drugs for acute stroke and other critical conditions.