Biography
Dr. Claudio Zito is an Assistant Professor at the School of Mathematical and Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University Dubai (HWUD), a position he has held since 2023. He serves as the Enterprise & Entrepreneurship Director for MACS Dubai, Director of the Heriot-Watt Lab of AI and Robotics Research (LAIRR), Academic Lead for the Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in AI and Robotics, and the Dubai representative for the Heriot-Watt Robotics and AI Global Research Institute (GRI).
Dr. Zito’s work has been supported by several prestigious funding bodies, including the EU's FP7 and H2020 initiatives, EPSRC, Airbus, the UK's National Centre of Nuclear Robotics (NCNR).
He is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) of the CogWaters project, funded by the Dubai Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) program (2024). Additionally, he was the PI for Mubadala's Higher Education Robotic Competition, focusing on the GBOT project aiming to develop an autonomous robot for water debris collection. The GBOT project achieved third place in the autonomous track at the competition in April 2025.
Before joining HWUD, Dr. Zito was a Lead Scientist in Robot Control and Learning at the Technology Innovation Institute (TII) in Abu Dhabi from 2020 to 2023. From 2015 to 2020, he held positions at the University of Birmingham, including Assistant Professor in AI and Computer Science and Senior Research Fellow at the Extreme Robotics Lab, Centre of Computational Neuroscience and Cognitive Robotics, and Intelligent Robotics Lab.
As a member of IEEE RAS, Dr. Zito has published over 20 research papers in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, contributing significantly to the field of robotics and AI. He is an alumnus of the EU-Japan Centre 'Vulcanus in Japan' since 2007.