Bartomeu Pou

Barcelona, Spain

tom_93_mot@hotmail.com

I am a researcher at the Instituto de Investigación en Inteligencia Artificial (IIIA-CSIC) and Associate Professor at EADA Business School. I hold dual PhDs in Artificial Intelligence (Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, UPC) and Astronomy & Astrophysics (PSL — Observatoire de Paris), both awarded in October 2025.

My research combines reinforcement learning, computer vision, adaptive optics, and social robotics, with a focus on autonomous systems that operate in real time under strong computational constraints. I have international experience at the Subaru Telescope / NAOJ (Hawaii, USA), the Australian National University (Canberra), and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

My current work focuses on social robotics for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), developing perception systems for visual engagement, gesture recognition, and adaptive decision-making on real robots with limited resources (project EMOROBCARE).

Previously, during my PhD, I developed reinforcement learning agents for real-time adaptive optics control, integrated into platforms such as SCExAO (Subaru Telescope), CACAO, and COSMIC.

Research interests: Reinforcement Learning · Social Robotics · Computer Vision · Vision-Language Models · Real-Time Control · Human-Robot Interaction

Google Scholar: scholar.google.com

Selected Publications

HRI

Real-Time Vision for Socially Aware Robots: Gesture, Pointing, and Visual Engagement Estimation

Bartomeu Pou and Raquel Ros

In Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 2026

Bib

@inproceedings{pou2026real,
  title = {Real-Time Vision for Socially Aware Robots: Gesture, Pointing, and Visual Engagement Estimation},
  author = {Pou, Bartomeu and Ros, Raquel},
  booktitle = {Companion Proceedings of the 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction},
  pages = {860--864},
  year = {2026},
}

ICSR

EMOROBCARE: A Low-Cost Social Robot for Supporting Children with Autism in Therapeutic Settings

Sara Cooper, Bartomeu Pou, Arnau Mayoral Macau, and 3 more authors

In International Conference on Social Robotics, 2026

DOI Bib

@inproceedings{cooper2026emorobcare,
  title = {{EMOROBCARE}: A Low-Cost Social Robot for Supporting Children with Autism in Therapeutic Settings},
  author = {Cooper, Sara and Pou, Bartomeu and Mayoral Macau, Arnau and Redondo, Alberto and Rios, David and Ros, Raquel},
  booktitle = {International Conference on Social Robotics},
  pages = {607--615},
  year = {2026},
  publisher = {Springer Nature Singapore},
  doi = {10.1007/978-981-95-2379-5_53},
}

ICLR

Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning

Matteo Gallici, Mattie Fellows, Benjamin Ellis, and 4 more authors

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning RepresentationsCore ranking A* , 2025

Bib

@inproceedings{gallici2025simplifying,
  title = {Simplifying Deep Temporal Difference Learning},
  author = {Gallici, Matteo and Fellows, Mattie and Ellis, Benjamin and Pou, Bartomeu and Masmitja, Ivan and Foerster, Jakob Nicolaus and Martin, Mario},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Learning Representations},
  year = {2025},
}

Opt. Express

Integrating supervised and reinforcement learning for predictive control with an unmodulated pyramid wavefront sensor for adaptive optics

Bartomeu Pou, Jeffrey Smith, Eduardo Quinones, and 2 more authors

Optics ExpressWOS JCR IF: 3.3 , 2024

DOI Bib

@article{pou2024integrating,
  title = {Integrating supervised and reinforcement learning for predictive control with an unmodulated pyramid wavefront sensor for adaptive optics},
  author = {Pou, Bartomeu and Smith, Jeffrey and Quinones, Eduardo and Martin, Mario and Gratadour, Damien},
  journal = {Optics Express},
  volume = {32},
  number = {21},
  pages = {37011--37035},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {Optical Society of America},
  doi = {10.1364/OE.530254},
}

Opt. Express

Adaptive optics control with multi-agent model-free reinforcement learning

Bartomeu Pou, Florian Ferreira, Eduardo Quinones, and 2 more authors

Optics ExpressWOS JCR IF: 3.8 , 2022

DOI Bib

@article{pou2022adaptive,
  title = {Adaptive optics control with multi-agent model-free reinforcement learning},
  author = {Pou, Bartomeu and Ferreira, Florian and Quinones, Eduardo and Martin, Mario and Gratadour, Damien},
  journal = {Optics Express},
  volume = {30},
  number = {2},
  pages = {2991--3015},
  year = {2022},
  publisher = {Optical Society of America},
  doi = {10.1364/OE.444099},
}