Summary
Hossein Firooz is a Senior Research Software Engineer based in Espoo with nine years of experience applying reinforcement learning to robotics and closing the sim-to-real gap. He has blended academic rigor from dual master’s programs at Aalto University and Université Côte d'Azur with hands-on industry work at Sony AI and EPFL, delivering practical advances like latent action spaces that improved RL sample efficiency threefold. At Sony AI he built data pipelines reusing real ROS data, applied dynamics randomization, and worked with CI/CD, multithreading and AWS to make research reproducible and production-ready. Now at the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence, he focuses on turning research prototypes into robust systems for real robots. Colleagues describe him as both experimentally curious and engineering-minded—comfortable moving between simulation, data engineering and low-level systems. Unusually for an RL practitioner, he bridges cloud-native tooling and robotics middleware to accelerate deployment of learned controllers.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at Aalto University
Master's degree Computer Engineering, Master's degree Computer Engineering at Sharif University of Technology
English, Persian