Rodney Brooks

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Rodney Allen Brooks
Rodney Brooks in 2005
Rodney Brooks in 2005
Born December 30, 1954 (1954-12-30) (age 54)
Adelaide
Residence U.S.
Nationality Australian
Fields Robotics
Institutions MIT
Alma mater Stanford University
Flinders University

Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954, in Adelaide, Australia) is Panasonic Professor of Robotics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp. From July 1, 2003, until June 30, 2007, he was director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; prior to that, he was director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

His work in robotics, first published in 1986 and subsequently elaborated upon in a series of highly influential papers, inaugurated a fundamental shift in artificial intelligence research. Brooks has argued strongly against symbolic processing approaches to creating intelligent machines, which had been the focus of AI since the days of Alan Turing, directly tracing back to the work of Gottlob Frege. Instead, Brooks has focused on biologically-inspired robotic architectures (e.g., the Subsumption architecture) that address basic perceptual and sensorimotor tasks. These had been largely dismissed as uninteresting by the mainstream AI community, which was far more interested in reasoning about the real world than in interacting with it. Conversely, Brooks argued that interacting with the physical world is far more difficult than symbolically reasoning about it. This perspective is perhaps best and most eloquently described in his classic paper, Elephants Don't Play Chess.

Contents

[edit] Career summary, research

Current research:

  • engineering intelligent robots to operate in unstructured environments
  • understanding human intelligence through building humanoid robots

Previous research:

Corporate Spin-offs:

  • Founder and former Chief Technical Officer of iRobot [1]

[edit] Publications

Recent books and papers:

  • Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI (MIT Press, 1999) ISBN 0-262-52263-2
  • K. Warwick "Out of the Shady age: the best of robotics compilation", Review of Cambrian Intelligence: the early history of AI, by R A Brooks, Times Higher Educational Supplement, p. 32, 15th Sept. 2000.

Other publications include papers and books in:

Prof. Brooks was also co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is on the editorial boards of various journals including:

  • Adaptive Behavior
  • Artificial Life
  • Applied Artificial Intelligence
  • Autonomous Robots
  • New Generation Computing

[edit] Memberships, lectureships, prizes, etc

Memberships include:

Prizes include:

Lectureships include:

Film appearances include:

[edit] Sources

  1. ^ "FOXNews.com - Scientist: Military Working on Cyborg Spy Moths". http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,276182,00.html. Retrieved on 2008-06-24. 

[edit] External links

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