Graduate Institute

Magna cum laude for A. Mitrevski

20230130-alex-mitrevski-phd-defense-with-committee

Friday 3 February 2023

Congratulations to Alex Mitrevski, who successfully defended his PhD on 30.01.2023 at RWTH Aachen University.

Alex worked on his dissertation titled "Skill Generalisation and Experience Acquisition for Predicting and Avoiding Execution Failures" in a cooperative PhD project with the Knowledge-Based Systems group at RWTH Aachen University. The project was advised by our Prof. Paul G. Plöger and Prof. Gerhard Lakemeyer from RWTH Aachen University.

The examination committee consisted of:

  • the two advisors (Prof. Paul G. Plöger and Prof. Gerhard Lakemeyer)
  • Prof. Michael Beetz from the Institute for Artificial Intelligence (IAI) at the University of Bremen as an external evaluator
  • Prof. Bastian Leibe (RWTH Aachen University) as an additional examiner
  • Prof. Stefan Kowalewski (RWTH Aachen University) as chair of the examination committee

The dissertation was awarded a magna cum laude (1.0).

Image courtesy: Reinhard Linde (RWTH Aachen University)

 

What are your further professional plans? 
I will continue to stay here, in our newly founded Institute for AI and Autonomous Systems. In my research, I will continue to work on the topics I addressed in my PhD.

In the summer semester, I will offer a course on cognitive robotics for our MAS students.
-At this year's ICRA conference, I will organize (together with several colleagues) a workshop on robot execution errors (i.e., the main topic of my PhD).

We have asked Alex if he had some advice for our current PhD students:

„You need a group of people to support you; I was lucky enough to have two super PhD supervisors and the best colleagues in the world who always stood by me.”

„Financial security is incredibly important; I suppose we all do research because we think research is great and important, but without a reliable source of funding, it's hard to focus only on the PhD work (which you really need to do, especially in the last phase).”

„Networking is almost as important as the work itself. One must make the effort to interact with other researchers during the PhD and thus find potential partners for future collaborations.”

„A PhD can be hard to make work if you can't say "no." The PhD is not a time for side projects; one should concentrate on one's own PhD topic.”