Jun Tani

Prof. Dr. Jun Tani is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Hamburg, affiliated with the Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics, and Natural Sciences. His research focuses on cognitive agents' structural representation development through iterative interaction with the environment, leveraging predictive coding and active inference frameworks based on the free energy principle. His work spans robotics experiments in goal-directed planning, social embodied interactions, and meta-cognition. Notable contributions include a 2025 publication in Science Robotics exploring how limited sensory-motor-language learning enables compositional linguistic competency in robots. He has been an invited speaker at ICANN 2014 and holds an interdisciplinary background with prior roles at Sony, the Reagan Brain Institute, and KAIST. His research bridges neuroscience, robotics, and AI, emphasizing embodied cognition and developmental mechanisms.