Lotfi El Hafi

Lotfi El Hafi, PhD, is a Research Associate Professor at Ritsumeikan University, Japan. He received his MScEng in Mechatronics from the Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium, in 2013, and his PhD in Engineering from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST), Japan, in 2017. His master’s thesis contributed to TICO compression, now standardized as JPEG XS, for Ultra HD 4K/8K video distribution during an internship at intoPIX SA, and later as a Sales Engineer while completing the AWEX International Business & Management EXPLORT Program. He joined NAIST as MEXT Scholar in 2014. His PhD thesis proposed Simultaneous Tracking and Attention Recognition from Eyes (STARE), leveraging deep learning to extract behaviors from scene images reflected in the eyes. He joined Ritsumeikan University as a Senior Researcher in 2017, became a Research Assistant Professor in 2019, and has served as a Research Associate Professor since 2023. His research interests include service robotics, artificial intelligence, and system integration, with a focus on multimodal interaction in extended reality. He has authored dozens of academic publications, holds a double-digit h-index, and has secured substantial research funding as a Principal Investigator, including a competitive JSPS KAKENHI grant. His work has earned several research awards, including the Best of IET and IBC 2016–2017, the JST CREST Best Award for Forecasting Research Proposal (2019), the RSJ HSR Community Research Encouragement Award (2022), and the Best Paper Awards at IEEE/SICE SII 2023 and IEEE IRC 2024. He has also won numerous robotics competition prizes, including the 1st Place in the Airbus Shopfloor Challenge at IEEE ICRA 2016, the Finalist Prize in the Amazon Robotics Challenge 2017, the 2nd Place Regional Prize in Eastern Asia + South Eastern Asia in the OpenCV AI Competition 2021, and multiple 1st Places in the WRS Future Convenience Store Challenge since 2018, including one at IEEE/RSJ IROS 2022, alongside the SICE Award (2018), the NEDO Chairman’s Award (2018), and the METI Minister’s Award (2020) for excellence in WRS. These achievements led to his appointment as a Specially Appointed Researcher of HSR Community by Toyota Motor Corporation from 2020 to 2022, and as a Research Advisor for Robotics Competitions at the Robotics Hub of Panasonic Corporation since 2019. He is an active member of RSJ and IEEE, where he served as Associate Editor for IEEE RO-MAN 2021 and Publicity Chair for IEEE/SICE SII 2026. He is also the President & Founder of Coarobo GK. [Last updated: June 2025.]