Biography
Dr. Inman Harvey
Inman Harvey has a background in mathematics, philosophy, anthropology and oriental carpet-dealing.
For the last 11 years he has been researching in the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems group at the
University of Sussex, which he helped to found whilst pursuing a doctorate in the development of
artificial evolution for design problems. This has lead to a series of projects in evolutionary robotics,
where the 'brain' and other aspects of the 'body' of a robot are designed through methods akin to
Darwinian evolution; this naturally has philosophical implications. Other applications of interest include
evolvable hardware, and directed evolution of pharmaceutical molecules.
Prof. Robert Full
Robert J. Full is a biologist in the Department of Integrative Biology at the
University of California at Berkeley where he directs the Poly-PEDAL
Laboratory that studies the Performance, Energetics and Dynamics of Animal
Locomotion (PEDAL) in many-footed creatures (Poly). He completed his BA in
1979 and PhD in 1984 at SUNY Buffalo. In 1996 he was awarded Berkeley's
Distinguished Teaching Award. In 1997 he became a Chancellor's Professor at
Berkeley and in 1998 he received a Goldman Professorship. Robert Full has
been instrumental in the formation of interdisciplinary collaborations
composed of biologists, engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists
at numerous universities and companies such as Rockwell, iRobot, Stanford
Research Institute, and Pixar. His efforts have reinvigorated traditional
biology as symbolized by the name change of America's leading society for
the study of whole organisms from the American Society of Zoologists to the
Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. Robert Full's research
program in comparative physiology and biomechanics has shown how examining
a diversity of animals in the context of evolution leads to the discovery
of remarkably general principles in dynamics, neurobiology, and musculo-
skeletal function. These principles have provided biological inspiration for
the design of novel multi-legged robots, control systems, artificial muscles
and dry adhesives. He has delivered over 180 presentations to groups
interested in physiology, biomechanics, mathematics, medicine, sports, space
exploration, robotics, defense, education, entertainment, computer science
and animatronics.
http://polypedal.berkeley.edu
Dr. Hiroaki Kitano
Prof. Jordan Pollack
Jordan Pollack is a professor of computer science and complex systems at Brandeis University. He received
the Ph.D from University of Illinois in 1987, and taught at Ohio State University from 1988-1994 prior to
moving to Boston. He has produced 9 Ph.D's so far, contributing to a range of different fields related to
AI, like neural networks, dynamical systems, evolutionary computation, machine learning, cognitive science,
artificial life, robotics, and educational technology, and intellectual property. His laboratory, the
Dynamical and Evolutionary Machine Organization, www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu,
has been partially funded by ONR, NSF, and DARPA. Jordan advises several startup companies, and founded
Thinmail.com. He was named one of MIT Technology Review's "TR 10"
in January 2001.
Dr. Owen Holland
Owen Holland began his professional life by training as an engineer, but became increasingly interested in
psychology, and took a B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology at the University of Nottingham in 1969. After carrying
out early research into neural networks, he moved to the Psychology Department of the University of
Edinburgh, where he taught experimental methods and statistics until 1975. For the next fifteen years he
worked in commerce and engineering, particularly in the fields of telecommunications and precision
metrology. While working as Senior Production Engineer for Renishaw Metrology Ltd, he began to investigate
the application of neural network technology to robotics; in 1990 he won a Department of Trade and
Industry Small Firms Merit Award for Research and Technology, and set up a consultancy business,
Artificial Life Technologies.
In 1993 he moved to the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, as Senior Research Fellow in
Electronics; in 1997 he was promoted to Reader in Electronics. He was a founder member of the Intelligent
Autonomous Systems Engineering Laboratory. While Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of
Interdisciplinary Research, University of Bielefeld, Germany, in 1994, he began working with biologists,
and produced the first robot system modelled on an ant colony. In 1995, he rediscovered an original Grey
Walter tortoise robot, now in the London Science Museum. While at UWE, he consulted for several major
companies, including Royal Mail, British Aerospace, Procter and Gamble, and Hewlett Packard. It was at HP
Laboratories, working with Ruud Schoonderwoerd, that he was the co-developer of the application of swarm
intelligence techniques to the control of telecommunications networks, which continues to be an active
research area in many laboratories. In 1997 he was appointed Visiting Associate in Electrical Engineering
at the California Institute of Technology; he was reappointed in 2000 and 2001. While at Caltech, he was
Co-Principal Investigator for two robotics projects, funded by DARPA and ONR, into Distributed Robotics
and Plume Tracing. At UWE, in 1998, he began the world's first project to develop a robotic predator, the
Slugbot, which would live free on agricultural land, catching slugs, and fermenting the corpses to obtain
biogas to power itself.
In 1999 he was invited by Steve Grand, author of the Creatures artificial life software, to become
Principal Research Scientist at the Cyberlife Institute. It was there that Owen began his work on machine
consciousness. When the Institute closed in late 1999, due to company reorganisation, he returned to
Caltech, and from there moved to Starlab, a private research laboratory in Brussels, Belgium, as Chief
Scientist on the Conscious Machine project. In 2001, Starlab in turn was forced to close by financial
pressures. Owen is currently Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Essex, England.
Owen Holland has published over seventy papers in refereed journals and conferences. With David McFarland,
an eminent zoologist, he recently co-authored Artificial Ethology, a graduate level textbook on
biologically inspired robotics. He is a reviewer for several journals, including Artificial Life, and
Adaptive Behavior. He has also been active in conference organisation, and recently served on the
organising committee of the first workshop on machine consciousness, held in May 2001. Owen is married,
with three children.
Dr. Dario Floreano
Dario Floreano is NSF Professor of Bio inspired Adaptive Machines at the Institute of Robotics of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL). He received a BA in Visual Psychophysics from the University of Trieste (I) in 1988 and worked until 1991 as research fellow at the National Research Council in Roma (I) on artificial evolution of simulated robots. In 1992 he obtained an MS in Neural Computation from the University of Stirling (UK) and in
1995 a PhD with a thesis on Evolutionary Robotics from the University of Trieste. After one year as computational neuroscientist in a project on cortical architecture with the University of Stirling and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Science in Frankfurt, in 1996 he joined EPFL as
senior researcher to continue work on evolutionary robotics. In 1998 he was invited researcher at Sony CSL in Tokyo and in 2000 was appointed National Science Foundation professor. Dario Floreano has published about 50 technical papers, wrote 2 books (one on Artificial Neural Networks and one on Evolutionary Robotics with S. Nolfi), and co edited 2 other books. He co organized the 5th European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL99) and the 6th International Conference on Simulation of Adaptive Behavior (SAB2000), and joined the program committee of about 30 other international conferences. He is on the editorial board of the journals Neural Networks, Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines, Adaptive Behavior, and Artificial Life. He is also a founding director of the International Society for Artificial Life, a member of the management board of the European Network on Evolutionary Computation, and a member
of several professional societies. His current research interests are in the area of evolutionary machines, reconfigurable robotics, organic electronics, computational neuroscience, cellular computing, and self assembling nanostructures.
Prof. Rodney Brooks
Rodney A. Brooks is Director of the 230 person MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and is the Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of 125 person 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 developed the behavior based approach to mobile robots which iRobot Corp is now commercializing. During the last decade he has concentrated at MIT on humanoid robots and social interactions. His new research projects are aimed at building "living machines", machines whose natural description will be that they are alive in the same sense as animals or plants.
http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/brooks
http://www.irobot.com
Dr. Francesco Mondada
Francesco Mondada got a MSc in Microengineering developing a juggling robot at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in 1991. Getting more interested in bio inspired approaches and mobile robotics, he developed the Khepera robot with Edo Franzi and Andr1 Guignard at the Laboratoire de Microinformatique (LAMI) of the EPFL. This research platform started a new approach to mobile robotics, bringing mobile robotics on everybody's desk and letting people move from simulation to reality. The success of Khepera has been the starting point of K Team, a company now selling this and other robotic platforms for research and education. Francesco Mondada has been director and president of K Team from its creation to end 2000. In this period, in addition to the marketing of Khepera and other new robots, he led several projects of integration of mobile robotics into art and entertainment. He left the company to join again the EPFL and to start new projects in mobile robotics system engineering. In 1997 he got a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) working with Dario Floreano on evolutionary robotics. Since his MSc he got several prizes related with Khepera and K Team, including prizes for technical innovation, artistic and economic mentions. His interests focus on several aspects of system engineering applied to mobile robotics, including interdisciplinary approaches to mobile robotics related to biology, art and entertainment. As
engineer, he is still interested in the development of innovative engineering solutions for mobile autonomous robots, in the creation of know how for future applications, and in making mobile platforms more accessible for education and research, particularly if not strictly related with technical fields.
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