CV

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Brief Biography

Harold Soh is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the National University of Singapore, where he leads the Collaborative Learning and Adaptive Robots (CLeAR) lab. His research focuses on trustworthy embodied AI: reliable, fluent, and safe robots that people can depend on. His work connects understanding human trust with building dependable robots, spanning mathematical foundations, learning algorithms, and physical systems. His recent research explores touch perception for contact-rich interactions and robot policies that can be guided by human goals and constraints. He was awarded an NRF Investigatorship in 2026 and a Robotics: Science and Systems Early Career Spotlight in 2023. His work has been recognized with best paper awards and nominations at IROS’21, IEEE TAFFC’21, RSS’18, HRI’18, RecSys’18, and IROS’12. He is also a co-founder of TacnIQ, a startup developing touch-enabled intelligence. Harold obtained his PhD from Imperial College London in 2013, with a thesis on online learning for assistive robotics. He lives in Singapore with his wife and two children, and enjoys reading science fiction with a glass of wine.

Honours and Awards

Year Award Comment
2026 NRF Investigatorship National Research Foundation, Singapore; Learning Persistent Agent-Centric Representations for Embodied AI
2026 Overall Champion, REAL-I Embodied AI Challenge, ICRA Advisor to the winning CLeAR team led by Jiaming Wang
2025 First Place, Earth Rover Challenge, ICRA Advisor to the winning CLeAR team led by Jiaming Wang
2025 University Teaching Awards Honour Roll (2025 – 2029)  
2024 Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA) University Level Teaching Award
2023 Early Career Spotlight Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS) 2023
2022 Best of IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing (T-AFFC) 2021 Award Applying Probabilistic Programming to Affective Computing
2022 Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA) University Level Teaching Award
2021 Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA) School of Computing, NUS
2021 Annual Teaching Excellence Award (ATEA) University Level Teaching Award
2021 IEEE/RSJ IROS Best Paper Award Extended Tactile Perception: Vibration Sensing through Tools and Grasped Objects
2020 Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA) School of Computing, NUS
2019 Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA) School of Computing, NUS
2018 RSS Best Paper Award Finalist The Transfer of Human Trust in Robot Capabilities across Tasks
2018 ACM/IEEE HRI Best Paper Award Finalist Planning with Trust for Human Robot Collaboration
2018 ACM RecSys Best Long Paper Award Runner-up Generation Meets Recommendation: Proposing Novel Items for Groups of Users
2018 Faculty Teaching Excellence Award (FTEA)  
2014-2016 SMART Postdoctoral Scholar Fellowship Award Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
2012-2013 Design London Fellow Imperial-RCA Fellowships
2012 James Dyson National Award Finalist (UK) Assistive Robotic Transport for Youngsters (ARTY)
2012 IEEE/RSJ IROS Best Cognitive Robotics Paper Finalist Online Spatio-Temporal Gaussian Process Experts with Application to Tactile Classification
2009-2013 Khazanah Global Scholarship Khazanah Foundation Malaysia
2000-2004 Regents Scholarship University of California, Davis

Professional Service

  • Senior Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 2025–present.
  • Associate Editor, The International Journal of Robotics Research, 2023–present.
  • Associate Editor, ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction, 2021–2024.
  • Associate Editor, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2021–2024.
  • Program Co-Chair, ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), 2024.
  • Technical Advances Theme Chair, HRI, 2021 and 2023.
  • Late-Breaking Reports Chair, HRI, 2019.

Selected Invited Talks

  • Invited keynote, RPL Summer School, Sweden, June 2026.

  • Invited keynote, JNRH, Montpellier, France, June 2026.

  • Invited Panelist, R:SS Panel on Past, Present, and Future of Robotics Research, 2025.
  • Invited Speaker, R:SS Workshop on Navigating Contact Dynamics in Robotics, 2025.
  • Invited Speaker, R:SS 2025 Workshop on Human-in-the-Loop Robot Learning: Teaching, Correcting, and Adapting, 2025.
  • Keynote, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) - HRI Session, 2025.
  • Invited Speaker, Rethinking Social, Task, and Motion Planning with Foundation Models (ICRA Workshop), 2025
  • Keynote, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.
  • Invited Speaker, Towards Collaborative Partners: Design, Shared Control, and Robot Learning for Physical HRI (ICRA Workshop), 2024.
  • Invited Speaker, Microsoft Research Asia ACE Seminar, 2024.
  • Invited Speaker, R:SS Workshop on Safety and Normative Behaviors in Human-Robot Interaction, 2024
  • Invited Speaker, Future of Robotics Debates, ICRA 2024.
  • Invited Speaker, ICRA Workshop on Communicating Robot Learning in Human-Robot Interaction, 2023.
  • Invited Speaker, ICRA Workshop on Assistive Manipulation, 2023
  • Invited Speaker, HRI Workshop on Advancing HRI Research and Benchmarking through Open-Source Ecosystems, 2023.
  • Invited Panelist, HRI Pioneers 2023.
  • Invited Speaker, NeurIPS Workshop on Progress and Challenges in Building Trustworthy Embodied AI, 2022.
  • Invited Speaker, Towards Trustworthy Robots that Interact with People, GRASP Fall Seminar, University of Pennsylvania, 2022.
  • Invited Panelist, Principles and understanding of RL algorithms and models, IROS RL-CONFORM workshop, 2022
  • Invited Speaker, Workshop on Human Theory of Machines and Machine Theory of Mind for Human Agent Teams, IROS 2022.
  • Invited Speaker, Workshop on Close Proximity Human-Robot Collaboration Challenges & Opportunities, R:SS 2022.
  • Invited Speaker, Center for Robotics and Neural Systems (CRNS), University of Plymouth, 2022
  • Invited Speaker, Trust and Touch for HRI, QUT Centre for Robotics, Australia, Feb 2022.
  • Invited Speaker, Trust, Touch, and Talk for HRI, University of Southern California (USC), USA, Oct 2021.
  • Invited Speaker, Event-based Learning and Perception, 2021 Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop.
  • Invited Speaker, Learning and Perception with Event-Based Tactile Sensors, ICRA 2021 VITAC Workshop.
  • Invited Speaker, Trust in Human Robot Collaboration, RSS 2020 Workshop on Emergent Behaviors in Human-Robot Systems.
  • Invited Speaker, Human Robot Trust, AI & Robotics Global Conference 2019 / The Robot Of The Year 2019.

Selected Press and Interviews