About

Alexandre Coninx is a researcher working at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, and human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on open-ended and developmental learning in autonomous systems. His most influential work explores how robots can sustain meaningful, long-term interactions with children, notably through multi-activity switching strategies that keep young users engaged in learning and therapeutic contexts — a paper that has garnered over 100 citations and established him as a notable voice in social robotics. Coninx has also made significant contributions to the theoretical foundations of open-ended learning, proposing conceptual frameworks grounded in representational redescription that bridge reinforcement learning and developmental robotics, earning over 60 citations. His broader research agenda addresses how robots can autonomously build affordance maps, learn from demonstration, and acquire state representations in unstructured environments. More recently, he has explored few-shot quality-diversity optimization, extending meta-learning principles into evolutionary and behavioral repertoire frameworks. Across his work, Coninx consistently pursues a core question: how can robots become genuinely adaptive agents capable of learning and operating meaningfully beyond tightly controlled laboratory conditions.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

7
H-Index
11
Papers
226
Total Citations
21
Avg Citations/Paper
🏆 Most Cited Paper
Towards Long-Term Social Child-Robot Interaction: Using Multi-Activity Switching to Engage Young Users
101 citations · 2015
📈 Most Prolific Year: 2022 (2 Papers)
🤝 Key Collaborators: 51
🏛 Institutions: Imperial College London, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique, Sorbonne Université

Top Papers

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Key Collaborators

Contact & Links

Available for collaboration
Content generated · 14 days ago