Rodney Allen Brooks

Rodney Allen Brooks (b. December 30, 1954 in Adelaide) is currently (2005) director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Panasonic Professor of Robotics. He is Chief Technical Officer and sits on the Board of iRobot Corp[1].

His seminal 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.

Career summary, research

• Degree in pure mathematics from Flinders University of South Australia
• Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University (1981)
• Research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT
• Faculty position at Stanford University
• Joined the faculty of MIT (1984)

Current research:

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

Publications

Recent books and papers:

• Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New AI (MIT Press, 1999) ISBN 0262522632
• The Relationship Between Matter and Life (in Nature 409, pp. 409-411; 2001)
• Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us (Pantheon, 2002) ISBN 0375420797

Other publications include papers and books in:

• model-based computer vision
• path planning
• uncertainty analysis
• robot assembly
• active vision
• autonomous robots
• behavior based AI
• micro-robots
• micro-actuators
• planetary exploration
• representation
• artificial life
• humanoid robots
• compiler design

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

Memberships, lectureships, prizes, etc

Memberships include:

• Founding Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
• Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE)

Prizes include:

• Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence)

Lectureships include:

• Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota
• Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College
• Hyland lecturer at Hughes
• Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University