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]. December 30 is the 364th day of the year (365th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 1 day remaining. ... 1954 (MCMLIV) was a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Adelaide is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of South Australia, and is the fifth largest city in Australia, with a population of over 1. ... MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, or CSAIL, is an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, formed on July 1, 2003 by the merger of MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ...

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. Alan Turing is often considered the father of modern computer science. ... Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (8 November 1848, Wismar – 26 July 1925, Bad Kleinen) was a German mathematician who evolved into a logician and philosopher. ... Subsumption architecture is an AI concept originating from behavior based robotics. ...

Brooks impact of the field has been enormous and his influence rivals that of Marvin Minsky and John McCarthy. Marvin Lee Minsky (born August 9, 1927), sometimes affectionately known as Old Man Minsky, is an American scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of MITs AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. ... John McCarthy (computer scientist), inventor of the term artificial intelligence and much more. ...

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: Flinders University Flinders University, or The Flinders University of South Australia, is located in Adelaide, South Australia and was established in 1966. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university in Stanford, California, USA. Located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, Stanford lies at the... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ... It has been suggested that MIT class ring be merged into this article or section. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university in Stanford, California, USA. Located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, Stanford lies at the... It has been suggested that MIT class ring be merged into this article or section. ... 1984 (MCMLXXXIV) was a leap year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

• 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: Autonomous robots are robots which can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. ... Behavior Based Artificial Intelligence (BBAI) is a methodology for developing AI based on a modular decomposition of intelligence. ... Artificial life, also known as alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. ... A humanoid robot is a robot with its overall appearance based on that of the human body. ... A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language compiler. ...

• 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

Film appearances include: Washington Avenue Bridge at night The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities is the oldest and largest part of the University of Minnesota system. ... Dartmouth College is a private academic institution in Hanover, New Hampshire, in the United States. ... The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly known as Stanford University (or simply Stanford), is a private university in Stanford, California, USA. Located approximately 37 miles (60 kilometers) southeast of San Francisco in an unincorporated part of Santa Clara County adjacent to the city of Palo Alto, Stanford lies at the...

• Being himself in the Errol Morris movie Fast, Cheap and Out of Control (named after one of his scientific papers)

Fast, Cheap and Out of Control is a 1997 non-fiction film by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris. ...

External links

• Home page
• The Deep Question Interview with Rodney Brooks by Edge
• Beyond Computation Talk with Rodney Brooks by Edge
• Intelligence Without Reason seminal criticism of Von Neumann computing architecture
• BBC article