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Quentin Houbre

Doctoral Researcher
Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences | Automation Technology and Mechanical Engineering
Tampere University
quentin.houbre [at] tuni.fi (quentin[dot]houbre[at]tuni[dot]fi)
+358503088343
Hervanta Campus
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1990-8935
https://github.com/rouzinho

About me

I studied cognitive sciences and I'm very curious on how intelligence is emerging and developing among humans and animals.

Responsibilities

Conduct research. Supervising Bachelor and Master Students.

Project links

Mission statement

The goal is to investigate the learning of new skills based on curiosity. By studying infant's development, it can be possible to design robots that are able to autonomously explore and learn. I am particularly interested on how intrinsic motivation can drive the exploration of new skills as well as how this process can be self-organized and continuous. Overall, I take inspiration from Neurosciences and Developmental Psychology to design cognitive systems.

Additionally, I worked for the european project ODIN by developing a modular approach for safe and intuitive human robot cooperation in industrial environment. I also obtained fundings to develop a neuromorphic computing framework that perform sensor fusion and propose a model of Retinal Ganglion Cells to predict the motion of an object.

Research topics

Autonomous Robotic Skills Discovery

Research unit

ATME (Cognitive Robotics Group)

Research fields

Developmental Robotics, Cognitive Robotics, Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology.

Selected publications

Houbre, Q., & Pieters, R. (2025). “Active exploration and working memory synaptic plasticity shapes goal-directed behavior in curiosity-driven learning”. Cognitive Systems Research, 101339.

Q.Houbre, A.Angleraud and R.Pieters, "Balancing Exploration and Exploitation : A Neurally Inspired Mechanism to Learn Sensorimotor Contingencies". HFR 2020 (accepted - preprint) 

Q. Houbre, A. Angleraud and R. Pieters, "An Inhibition of Return Mechanism for the Exploration of Sensorimotor Contingencies," 2020 IEEE International Conference on Human-Machine Systems (ICHMS), Rome, Italy (Preprint)). 

Q.Houbre, A.Angleraud, R.Pieters, "Exploration and Exploitation of Sensorimotor Contingencies for a Cognitive Embodied Agent". In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence 2020. 

Latest publications

All publications

Own links