Rate My Professor Michael Burke

Dr. Michael Burke is a Senior Lecturer in Robotics and AI in the Department of Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University's Faculty of Engineering. He serves as Deputy Graduate School Coordinator and Graduate Experience/Culture lead for ECSE. His research centers on learning-based methods for intelligent robotic systems, integrating perception, control, and reasoning to achieve robust performance in real-world environments. Core interests include robot learning, control as inference, probabilistic machine learning, computer vision, imitation learning, representation learning for robotics, vision-based robot control, and field robotics. Burke earned his PhD in statistical signal processing from the University of Cambridge (2012-2016), MSc in electronic engineering from Stellenbosch University, and BEng in electronic engineering from the University of Pretoria. He has authored over 50 peer-reviewed publications, with notable works including "Residual learning from demonstration" (2022, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters), "Driver drowsiness detection using behavioral measures and machine learning techniques: A review of state-of-art techniques" (2017), "Intelligent robotic sonographer: Mutual information-based disentangled reward learning from few demonstrations" (2024, International Journal of Robotics Research), "Generating robotic elliptical excisions with human-like tool-tissue interactions" (2024, IEEE ICRA), and "A new framework to predict and visualize technology acceptance: A case study of shared autonomous vehicles" (2025, Technological Forecasting and Social Change).

Prior to joining Monash in 2020, Burke was a Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour and led the Mobile Intelligent Autonomous Systems group at South Africa's Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), managing a team of 20 in computer vision, machine learning, and field robotics applications for agriculture, mining, and autonomous systems. He holds an Honorary Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. Burke has secured over $4 million AUD in competitive research and industry funding, including ARC grants for projects such as "Human models for accelerated robot learning and human-robot interaction" (2024-2027) and "Intelligent Robotics for Pharmaceutical Formulation Development" (2024-2027). Awards include Best Paper at AMDO 2014 and Runner-Up Best Paper at CoRL 2019. Since 2020, he has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, contributing to editorial leadership in the field.