Seymour Aubrey Papert was a South African-born American mathematician, computer scientist, and educator, who spent most of his career teaching and researching at MIT. He was one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence, and of the constructionist movement in education. He was co-inventor, with Wally Feurzeig and Cynthia Solomon, of the Logo programming language.
The School of Computer Science (SCS) at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, US is a school for computer science established in 1988. It has been consistently ranked among the top computer science programs over the decades. As of 2010 U.S. News & World Report ranks the graduate program as tied for 1st with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and University of California, Berkeley. It is ranked 1st in the United States on Computer Science Open Rankings, which combines scores from multiple independent rankings.
Cynthia Breazeal is an American robotics scientist and entrepreneur. She is a former chief scientist and chief experience officer of Jibo, a company she co-founded in 2012 that developed personal assistant robots.
Evolutionary robotics is an embodied approach to Artificial Intelligence (AI) in which robots are automatically designed using Darwinian principles of natural selection. The design of a robot, or a subsystem of a robot such as a neural controller, is optimized against a behavioral goal. Usually, designs are evaluated in simulations as fabricating thousands or millions of designs and testing them in the real world is prohibitively expensive in terms of time, money, and safety.
Josh Bongard is a professor at the University of Vermont and a 2010 PECASE awardee. He received his bachelor's degree in Computer Science from McMaster University, Canada, his master's degree from the University of Sussex, UK, and his PhD from the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He served as a postdoctoral associate under Hod Lipson in the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University in the United States from 2003 to 2006.
Stephen Malvern Omohundro is an American computer scientist whose areas of research include Hamiltonian physics, dynamical systems, programming languages, machine learning, machine vision, and the social implications of artificial intelligence. His current work uses rational economics to develop safe and beneficial intelligent technologies for better collaborative modeling, understanding, innovation, and decision making.
Howie Choset is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute. His research includes snakebots, or robots designed in a segmented fashion to mimic snake-like actuation and motion, demining, and coverage. His snake robots have also been used in surgical applications for diagnosis and tumor removal; nuclear power plant inspection, archaeological excavations, manufacturing applications and understanding biological behaviors of a variety of animals.
Bruce Howard McCormick (1928–2007) was an American computer scientist, Emeritus Professor at the Department of Computer Science, and founding director of the Brain Networks Lab at Texas A&M University.
John F. Canny is an Australian computer scientist, and Paul E Jacobs and Stacy Jacobs Distinguished Professor of Engineering in the Computer Science Department of the University of California, Berkeley. He has made significant contributions in various areas of computer science and mathematics, including artificial intelligence, robotics, computer graphics, human-computer interaction, computer security, computational algebra, and computational geometry.
Hod Lipson is an American robotics engineer. He is the director of Columbia University's Creative Machines Lab. Lipson's work focuses on evolutionary robotics, design automation, rapid prototyping, artificial life, and creating machines that can demonstrate some aspects of human creativity. His publications have been cited more than 26,000 times, and he has an h-index of 73, as of 29 March 2020. Lipson is interviewed in the 2018 documentary on artificial intelligence Do You Trust This Computer?
Christopher Granger Atkeson is an American roboticist and a professor at the Robotics Institute and Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Atkeson is known for his work in humanoid robots, soft robotics, and machine learning, most notably on locally weighted learning.
David Leigh Waltz was a computer scientist who made significant contributions in several areas of artificial intelligence, including constraint satisfaction, case-based reasoning and the application of massively parallel computation to AI problems. He held positions in academia and industry and at the time of his death, was a professor of Computer Science at Columbia University where he directed the Center for Computational Learning Systems.
Lydia E. Kavraki is a Greek-American computer scientist, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, a professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice University. She is also the director of the Ken Kennedy Institute at Rice University. She is known for her work on robotics/AI and bioinformatics/computational biology and in particular for the probabilistic roadmap method for robot motion planning and biomolecular configuration analysis.
John Matthew Hollerbach is a professor of computer science and research professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Utah. He is the editor of The International Journal of Robotics Research, a Senior Editor of Presence: Teleoperators & Virtual Environments, and a Governing Board member of the electronic journal Haptics-e.
Eureqa is a proprietary modeling engine originally created by Cornell's Artificial Intelligence Lab and later commercialized by Nutonian, Inc. The software uses evolutionary search to determine mathematical equations that describe sets of data in their simplest form. This task is generally referred to as symbolic regression in the literature.
Edward Farhi is physicist working on quantum computation as a Principal Scientist at Google. In 2018 he retired from his position as the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the Director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT from 2004 until 2016. He made contributions to particle physics, general relativity and astroparticle physics before turning to his current interest, quantum computation.
Yoram Koren is an Israeli-American academic. He is the James J. Duderstadt Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Manufacturing and the Paul G. Goebel Professor Emeritus of Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Since 2014 he is a distinguished visiting professor at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology.
Stephen E. Levinson is a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), leader of the Language Acquisition and Robotics Lab at UIUC, and a full-time faculty member of the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at UIUC. He works on speech synthesis, acquisition and recognition and the development of anthropomorphic robots.
Pieter Abbeel is a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab, and co-director of the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the co-founder of covariant.ai, a venture-funded start-up that aims to teach robots new, complex skills, and co-founder of Gradescope, an online grading system that has been implemented in over 500 universities nationwide. He is best known for his cutting-edge research in robotics and machine learning, particularly in deep reinforcement learning.
