about Fabian Plum
I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at Imperial College, London. My primary focus lies in Computer Vision and Deep Learning for large scale animal behavioural research, especially in domains where suitable training data is traditionally scarce. As a roboticist within the Department of Bioengineering I’m working on building accessible open source hardware and software tools for ecologists around the globe.
In my PhD thesis I focused on the development and use of computational methods to study the behaviour of social insects.
Whenever time permits, I’ve also been creating short films since 2005 and am in the midst of launching a company – focussing scAnt, the highly modular open-source macro 3D Scanner.
work experience
- since 2024 | Postdoctoral Researcher at Imperial College London - 3D reconstruction and multi-agent pose estimation
- since 2022 | Robotics Engineer (Sole Trader) - Developing 3D digitisation hardware and software
- 2017 - 2022 | Founder and Co. CEO of Mimic UG., Germany - Designed and prototyped biomimetic drones and robotics
- 2017 | Research Assistant at Juelich Super Computing Centre - Developed 3D visualisation software for pedestrian simulation data analysis
education
- 2019 - 2023 | Ph.D. in Computer Vision and Deep Learning at Imperial College, London
- 2018 - 2019 | M.Sc. in Human and Biological Robotics, Imperial College, London
- 2014 - 2018 | B.Sc. in Biomimetics City University of Applied Sciences, Bremen
scholarships & awards
- 2023 | AI for Bioscience grant, BBSRC 2023 International Partnering Awards ScAnt - an open-source platform for the creation of 3D models of arthropods (and other small objects) Awarded for the work on Synthetic data for robust and versatile animal pose estimation in 2D and 3D. Awarded in collaboration with David Labonte and Talmo Pereira, for a total of 330,000€
- 2022 | ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant, European Research Council, London ScAnt - an open-source platform for the creation of 3D models of arthropods (and other small objects) Awarded in collaboration with David Labonte, for a total of €150,000, to support the development of the scAnt plattform into an accessible, low-cost, and commercially viable scanning solution for the high-resolution digitisation of small objects.
- 2021 | 1st Price Winner - Open Electronics, Society for Experimental Biology Awarded for the best talk in the Open Electronics session at the SEB Annual Conference.
- 2021 | 1st Prize Winner Amazon PhD Prizes for Outstanding Achievement in Robotics
- 2020 | 1st Prize Winner of the PhD Summer Showcase, Imperial College, London
- 2019 - 2023 | President’s PhD Scholarship awarded by Imperial College, London
- 2018 | Innovation Award by the City University of Applied Sciences, Bremen
- 2015 - 2019 | Scholarship by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation
