Abderrahmane Kheddar is currently Directeur de Recherche at CNRS LIRMM, Montpellier, France, and the Director of the CNRS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory, UMI3218/CRT, Tsukuba, Japan. From sept 2003 to october 2008 he was appointed as a tenure professor at the university of Evry with a secondment position at CNRS as a codirector of the AIST-CNRS LIA in Japan. From sept 1998 to aug 2003 he was an assistant professor at the university of Evry heading the virtual reality and haptics group. He received the engineering diploma in computer science of the Institut National d'Informatique, Algiers, Algeria, the DEA (Master of science by research) and the Ph.D. degree in robotics, both from the University Paris 6, France. His research interests include haptics (sensing, display and computer haptics) and humanoids. He is a founding member of IEEE RAS chapter on haptics. He coordinated the CNRS national specific actions, the one dealing with collision detection and the other on haptics. He is the coordinator of the FP6 European project ROBOT@CWE, and is the CNRS representative of the FP6 European network of Excellence in Virtual Reality INTUITION, the PF6 integrated project ImmerSence, the FP5 project TOUCH-HapSys. He is editor of the IEEE transactions on Haptics, and the Journal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems.