Christopher E. Mower

I am a senior research scientist at Huawei Technologies Research & Development working at the intersection of robotics and machine learning. Previously, I was a Research Associcate in surgical robotics at King's College London. I hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh. Alongside my research in robotics, I am an advocate for open source projects and strive for the development of high-quality code.

CV Long Bio Google Scholar LinkedIn GitHub Software

• Jul 2024: visited ETH Zurich, Switzerland to commence projects with Prof Marco Hutter.
• Jul 2024: visited TU Darmstadt, Germany to commence project with Prof Jan Peters.
• Jun 2024: released paper about our recent work on the ROS-LLM framework, find the paper on arXiv and the code here.
• Jun 2024: visited Shenzhen and Dongguan, China to support HDC 2024 with Huawei Cloud team and LEJU Robotics.
• Mar 2024: visited Hangzhou, China to implement experiments for an upcoming paper and code release.
• Feb 2024: recent work released on using LLMs to generate optimal controllers, see website here!
• Jan 2024: paper accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024!
• Aug 2023: started new role at Huawei Technologies Research and Development.
• Aug 2023: finished my post-doc at King's College London.
• Jul 2023: article accepted at the Conference on New Technologies for Computer and Robot Assisted Surgery (CRAS) 2023!
• Jul 2023: article accepted at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) 2023!
• Jul 2023: visited Sorbonne University, Paris for the FAROS Integration week.
• Jun 2023: Released code for FRI-Client-SDK_Python, that provides Python bindings for the FRI Client SDK C++ from KUKA.
• May 2023: attended ICRA 2023 and presented our latest work.
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Apr 2023: Moved to Zurich, Switzerland to start a Visiting Scholar position at Balgrist University Hospital. I have joined the Research in Orthopedic Computer Science (ROCS) Group hosted by Prof. Dr. Philipp Fürnstahl.
Apr 2023: released code for aruco_markers.
Mar 2023: Moved to Leuven, Belgium to start a Visiting Scholar position at KU Leuven. I have joined the Robot-Assisted Surgery Group hosted by Prof. Emmanuel Vander Poorten.
Mar 2023: released code for Spatial CasADi.
Feb 2023: gave a talk at the King's SIE seminar on optimization-based methods for shared autonomy, slides.
Jan 2023: two papers accepted at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023 in London, UK!
Dec 2022: Attended and presented at CoRL 2022 in Auckland, New Zealand.
Dec 2022: awarded funding from the King's Global Engagement Partnership fund. This will support two visiting positions at KU Lueven, Belgium and Balgrist University Hospital, Switzerland.
Nov 2022: released the code for the ROS-PyBullet Interface.
Oct 2022: demonstrated some of my work in learning from demonstration, robotics, and shared autonomy to the public at New Scientist Live, ExCeL London 2022. You can see a video of my demonstration here.
Sept 2022: paper accepted at the Conference for Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022! Submission can be found here.
Sept 2022: visited KU Leuven for the fourth integration week and mid-review for the EU Horizon 2020 FAROS project.
Jul 2022: graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a PhD in Informatics .
Jul 2022: attended Surgical and Interventional Engineering Summer School at Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospital, King's College London.
Jun 2022: attended King's NeuroLab Teaching Sessions: Posterior lumbar spine approaches.
May 2022: paper accepted to IEEE 2022 ICRA Workshop on Shared Autonomy in Physical Human-Robot Interaction: Adaptability and Trust.
May 2022: started new role as Research Associate for Surgical Robot Control at King's College London.
May 2022: finished post-doc at the University of Edinburgh.
Feb 2022: won first prize for the best poster on "Non-prehensile Dual Arm Manipulation" at the 5th IEEE UK & Ireland RAS Conference 2022 with my colleages João Moura, Christian Rauch, Vladimir Ivan, and supervisor Sethu Vijayakumar.
Sep 2021: started a Research Associate position at the University of Edinburgh. I will be collaborating on the European Union Horizon 2020 HARMONY project.
Sep 2021: passed the viva for my PhD! My examiners were Professor Nick Hawes (University of Oxford) , and Dr Michael Herrmann (University of Edinburgh).
Jul 2021: published paper at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2021 (virtual conference).
Oct 2019: published paper at IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) 2019 in New Delhi, India.
Aug 2019: published paper at IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) 2019 in Vancouver, Canada.
Aug 2017: published paper at IEEE International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE) 2017.
Jun 2017: awarded the First Prize for Greatest Potential for Positive Impact at the Robots for Resilient Infrastructure Challenge, Leeds, UK. Project team: Wolfgang Merkt, Theodoros Stouraitis, and myself.
Sep 2016: started PhD Informatics at the University of Edinburgh.
Sep 2016: graduated from Imperial College London, MSc Computing (Visual Information Processing).
Sep 2015: graduated from the University of Manchester, MSc Applied Mathematics with Numerical Analysis.
Sep 2012: graduated from the University of Sheffield, BSc Mathematics.

Christopher E. Mower, Yuhui Wan, Hongzhan Yu, Antoine Grosnit, Jonas Gonzalez-Billandon, Matthieu Zimmer, Jinlong Wang, Xinyu Zhang, Yao Zhao, Anbang Zhai, Puze Liu, Daniel Palenicek, Davide Tateo, Cesar Cadena, Marco Hutter, Jan Peters, Guangjian Tian, Yuzheng Zhuang, Kun Shao, Xingyue Quan, Jianye Hao, Jun Wang, Haitham Bou-Ammar

paper website code

Christopher E. Mower, Hongzhan Yu, Antoine Grosnit, Jan Peters, Jun Wang, Haitham Bou-Ammar

paper website

Huanyu Tian, Martin Huber, Christopher E. Mower, Zhe Han, Changsheng Li, Xingguang Duan, Christos Bergeles.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.

arXiv

Christopher E. Mower, Martin Huber, Huanyu Tian, Ayoob Davoodi, Emmanuel Vander Poorten, Tom Verauteren, Christos Bergeles.

Conference on New Technologies for Computer and Robot Assisted Surgery (CRAS), 2023.

[Podium Presentation]

abstract paper

Charlie Budd, Jianrong Qiu, Oscar MacCormac, Martin Huber, Christopher E. Mower, Mirek Janatka Théo Trotouin, Jonathan Shapey, Mads S. Bergholt, Tom Verauteren

International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2023.

abstract arXiv

Christopher E. Mower, João Moura, Nazanin Zamani Behabadi, Sethu Vijayakumar, Tom Verauteren, Christos Bergeles.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), London, UK, 2023.

abstract paper arXiv video presentation poster code

Aya Mutaz Zeidan, Zhouyang Xu, Christopher E. Mower, Honglei Wu, Quentin Walker, Oyinkansola Ayoade, Natalia Cotic, Jonathan Behar, Steven Williams, Aruna Arujuna, Yohan Noh, Richard James Housden, Kawal Rhode.

IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), London, UK, 2023.

abstract paper

Christopher E. Mower, Theodoros Stouraitis, João Moura, Christian Rauch, Lei Yan, Nazanin Zamani Behabadi, Michael Gienger, Tom Verauteren, Christos Bergeles, Sethu Vijayakumar.

Proceedings of the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), Auckland, New Zealand, 2022.

abstract PMLR OpenReview video arXiv code poster documentation bibtex

Christopher E. Mower, João Moura, Theodoros Stouraitis, Sethu Vijayakumar.

Proceedings of the IEEE ICRA Workshop on Shared Autonomy in Physical Human-Robot Interaction: Adaptability and Trust, Philadelphia (PA), USA, 2022.

abstract paper talk poster slides script workshop bibtex

Christopher E. Mower

PhD Thesis, The University of Edinburgh, 2022.

This PhD was funded through an iCASE studentship by Costain and EPSRC - UKRI.

Supervisor: Profesor Sethu Vijayakumar FRSE.
Examiners: Professor Nick Hawes (University of Oxford) , and Dr J. Michael Herrmann (University of Edinburgh).

abstract pdf bibtex

Christopher E. Mower, João Moura, Sethu Vijayakumar.

Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS), Virtual Conference, 2021.

WWH abstract pdf poster video talk bibtex

Christopher E. Mower, João Moura, Aled Davies Sethu Vijayakumar,

28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), New Delhi, India, 2019.

abstract pdf bibtex

Christopher E. Mower, João Moura, Sethu Vijayakumar,

IEEE 15th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), Vancouver, Canada, 2019.

abstract pdf video arXiv bibtex

Wolfgang Merkt, Yiming Yang, Theodoros Stouraitis, Christopher E. Mower, Maurice Fallon, Sethu Vijayakumar,

IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE), Xi'an, China, 2017.

[First Prize for Greatest Potential for Positive Impact at the Robots for Resilient Infrastructure Challenge]

abstract pdf video outreach demo press (BBC) press (Made In Leeds TV) bibtex

The following are some old projects.

Christopher E. Mower, Objective Assessment for Surgical Dexterity, Masters Dissertation, Imperial College London, 2016.

Supervisor: Dr Benny Lo.

Christopher E. Mower, Learning Catheter Paths for Cardiac Mapping, Independent Study Option, Imperial College London, 2016.

Supervisor: Dr Su-Lin Lee.

Christopher E. Mower, Shrinking for Restoring Definiteness, Masters Dissertation, The University of Manchester, 2015.

The dissertation was funded by the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) through an industrial bursary.

Supervisors: Professor Nicholas J. Higham FRS, and Dr Craig Lucas.

code

Supervisor: Dr Craig Lucas.

As apart of an internship at NAG, I analyzed several algorithms for fixing invalid correlation matrices and implemented an optimized algorithm in FORTRAN. The code was included in the NAG Library. Furthermore, I authored the documentation and was involved with developing unit tests and example usage code.

G02ANF documentation code contributor acknowledgement