Maëlic Neau

About Me

Machine Learning & Robotics Researcher

  • Age:
  • Degree: PhD in Computer Science
  • Current: Postdoctoral Fellow
  • Phone: +33 06 42 58 07 31
  • Email: maelic.neau@umu.se
  • City: Umeå, Sweden

I am currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Umeå University in Sweden since April 2025, working with Assoc. Prof. Zoe Falomir as part of the UMU Spatial Lab. I have received my PhD in a cotutelle agreement between the Nationale d'Ingénieurs de Brest (ENIB), France and Flinders University, South Australia in 2025. I am working on Scene Understanding, Task Planning and Autonomous Manipulation for Domestic Service Robots. I am also interested in Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing in general. I am 2 times World Champion of the international competition for domestic service robots (RoboCup@Home - Social Standard Platform League) in 2022 and 2023 with the RoboBreizh team.



Latest News

Achievements

Awards

  • Higher Degree by Research (HDR) Leadership and Scholarly Excellence Award - Flinders University, 2023

Robotics Competitions

Research

Projects


  • All
  • Current
  • Past

GraSP-VLA

Graph-based Symbolic Action Representation for Long-Horizon Planning with VLA Policies

REACT

Real-time Efficiency and Accuracy Compromise for Tradeoffs in Scene Graph Generation

PhD Thesis

Scene Graph Generation and Commonsense Reasoning for Service Robots

ROBOBREIZH

French-Australian Team for the RoboCup@Home Competition

Master Thesis

Grasping Solutions for Domestic Service Robots

Social Dialogue

Commonsense Reasoning and Natural Language Processing

Students Supervision


  • Alistair MacVicar Visual Question-Answering from Scene Graphs.  2024
  • Nilesh Ramgolan Real-time object detection in the RoboCup@Home competition: the few-shot learning perspective.  2023
  • Sinuo Wang RoboNLU: Advancing Command Understanding with a Novel Lightweight BERT-based Approach for Service Robotics.  2023
  • Thomas Ung Development and integration of onboard ROS modules for an autonomous agent participating in the RoboCup@Home.  2022
  • Valentin Lopez & Trajano Mena Speech-To-Text on the edge: benchmarking solutions for the Pepper robot.   2022

Scientific Publications

2025

2024

2023

2022

Resume

You can download a full pdf version of my resume here

Sumary

Maëlic Neau

Postdoctoral Fellow in Computer Science with work experience in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. I have conducted research in France, Australia, Japan and Sweden.

  • Umeå, Sweden
  • +33 06 42 58 07 31
  • maelic.neau@umu.se

Education

PhD in Computer Science

October 2021 - March 2025

ENIB, Brest - France / Flinders University, Adelaide - Australia

Topic: "Real-Time And Efficient Scene Graph Generation for Real-World Applications: An End-to-End Investigation"

Supervisors: Cédric Buche (CNRS / ENIB), Paulo E. Santos (Flinders University), Anne-Gwenn Bosser (ENIB) and Karl Sammut (Flinders University)

Master of Computer Science

2019 - 2021

Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest - France / Umeå University, Umeå - Sweden

Artificial Intelligence and Robotics

Bachelor of Computer Science

2018 - 2019

Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest - France

2 years degree in Computer Science

2016 - 2018

IUT de Lannion, Lannion - France

Professional Experience

Postdoctoral Fellow

May 2025 - Current

Computing Science Department, Umeå University, Sweden

  • Spatially-Aware Vision-Language Action Models for Robotic Manipulation
  • Supervisor: Assoc. Pr. Zoe Falomir

Research Intern

October 2024 - March 2025

National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

  • Toward Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation with Vision-Language Models
  • Supervisor: Pr. Akihiro Sugimoto

Casual Academic

February - June 2023

Flinders University, South Australia

  • Tutoring for lab session
  • Course: COMP8802 Fundamentals of Computational Intelligence

Research Intern

February - August 2021

Lab-STICC / ENIB - Plouzané, France

  • Objects Recognition and Manipulation with Toyota HSR robot
  • Third place at the 2021 RoboCup@Home Competition
  • Supervisor: Pr. Cédric Buche

Research Intern

April - August 2020

Lab-STICC / ENIB - Plouzané, France

  • Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM) and Social Dialogue (NLP / Commonsense Reasoning) with ROS for the Pepper robot.
  • Best Performance Award at the 2020 RoboCup@Home Education Challenge.
  • Supervisor: Pr. Cédric Buche

Research Intern

May - July 2018

Northern Kentucky University - Highland Heights, USA

  • Artificial Intelligence applied to Software Engineering
  • Supervisor: Pr. Richard Fox

Contact

LinkedIn:

Maëlic Neau

Email:

maelic.neau@umu.se

Phone:

+33 06 42 58 07 31

Location:

Mit-huset, Campustorget 5, 901 87, Umeå, Sweden