Kai Arras

Prof. Dr. Kai Arras studied at ETH Zurich and received his doctorate from EPFL in Lausanne in 2003. He was a postdoc at KTH Stockholm and the University of Fribourg and was awarded funding as a DFG junior research group leader in the field of social robotics in 2007. From 2010 to 2015, he was a junior professor at the University of Fribourg and has been a Cyber Valley Endowed Professor for Autonomous Systems at the University of Stuttgart since 2023. At the same time, he pursued an industrial career by founding and transferring to start-ups, worked as a Senior Research Scientist at Evolution Robotics in Pasadena, California, and was Head of Robotics Research at Bosch from 2015 to 2023. There he researched topics such as AI-based service robots and production assistants with transfers to various business areas. In 2017, he was listed as one of Germany's “100 Innovators” by Handelsblatt magazine, and in 2022 he served as an expert on the “AI-based robotics” task force for the German Chancellor's Council for the Future.