RODNEY A. BROOKS, PH.D. - Robotics Specialist
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Rodney A. Brooks is Director of the recently merged MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. His research is concerned with both the engineering of intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments, and with understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots. He has published papers and books in model-based computer vision, path planning, uncertainty analysis, robot assembly, active vision, autonomous robots, micro-robots, micro-actuators, planetary exploration, representation, artificial life, humanoid robots, and compiler design.

Dr. Brooks is a Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence). He has been the Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College, the Hyland lecturer at Hughes, and the Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University. He was co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots and New Generation Computing. He serves on the board of the Intelligent Inspection Corporation. He starred as himself in the Errol Morris movie "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control"; named for one of his scientific papers, a Sony Classics picture, now available on videocassette. His most recent publications include "Cambrian Intelligence," (MIT Press, 1999), "The Relationship Between Matter and Life" (in Nature 409, pp. 409-411; 2001) and "Flesh and Machines," (Pantheon, 2002)