Professor Hanna Kurniawati is the SmartSat Professorial Chair for System Autonomy, Intelligence and Decision Making from the Australian National University (ANU). She is also Node Lead and Planning and Control theme lead for the Australian Robotics Inspection and Asset Management (ARIAM) Hub. During her time at ANU, Professor Kurniawati founded the Robot Decision Making group and was deputy lead of the interdisciplinary research project Humanising Machine Intelligence.
Professor Kurniawati holds a Bachelor of Science from the University of Indonesia, as well as a PhD in Computer Science for work in Robot Motion Planning from the National University of Singapore. Following the completion of her PhD, Professor Kurniawati worked as a Postdoctoral Associate then a Research Scientist at Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology. She has also previously been a faculty member at the University of Queensland School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) before moving to ANU in 2019 and Computer Sciences Futures Fellow.
Professor Kurniawati’s research spans across many disciplines, including planning under uncertainty, robotics, robot motion planning, integrated planning and learning, and computational geometry applications. Her work focuses on algorithms that can enable robust decision theory to become practical software tools, with applications in robotics and the assurance of autonomous systems. Such software tools will enable robots to design their own strategies, such as deciding what data to use, how to gather the data, and how to move, for accomplishing various tasks well, despite various modelling errors and types of uncertainty, and despite limited to no information about the system and its operating environment.
Professor Kurniawati is actively involved in the robotics community as a Senior Editor for Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Robotics and Automation Letters, as General Chair for the Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots IEEE International Conference 2018 and Program Co-Chair for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2022.