The SCIoI Scientific Advisory Board

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT. A robotics entrepreneur, he is best known for popularizing the actionist approach to robotics, studying and engineering robots with the goal of finding artificial general intelligence.    He is currently cofounder and CTO of Robust.AI, a software company that is building a cognitive engine for robots and smart machines. He was recently Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics, a company whose mission is to apply artificial intelligence to physical labor. He is also a Founder, former Board Member and former CTO of iRobot Corp, makers of the Roomba vacuum. Further, Dr. Brooks is the former Director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Rodney Brooks received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He has held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has published many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life.

Dr. Brooks publishes frequent entries on robotics in his blog, through which he shares essays, views, predictions, and reviews. Check out his website here.

For decades, Patricia Churchland has contributed to the fields of philosophy of neuroscience, philosophy of the mind and neuroethics. Her research has centered on the interface between neuroscience and philosophy with a current focus on the association of morality and the social brain. A Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego and Adjunct Professor at the Salk Institute, Pat holds degrees from Oxford University, the University of Pittsburg and the University of British Columbia. She has been awarded the MacArthur Prize, The Rossi Prize for Neuroscience and the Prose Prize for Science. She has authored multiple pioneering books, her most recent being Touching a Nerve. She has served as President of the American Philosophical Association and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Pat lives in Solana Beach, California, with her husband Paul, a neurophilosopher, and their labradoodle Millie. They have two children, Anne and Mark, both neuroscientists. Read more about her work on her website.

Naomi Ehrich Leonard is a control theorist whose work involves analysis and design of feedback and interconnection in complex, dynamical systems.  She uses mathematical models and methods to study mechanisms of collective motion and collective decision making for multi-agent systems in nature (analysis of animal and human groups) and in engineering (design of autonomous robotic teams and mobile sensor networks).  She has applied her work to the collective dynamics of killifish, starlings, honeybees, zebras, and desert harvester ants, as well as to rule-based improvisational dance.  She led a multidisciplinary ocean sensing project with a month-long deployment of an automated, adaptive network of underwater robotic vehicles in Monterey Bay, CA.  Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and associated faculty member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University.  She is a MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, IEEE, SIAM, ASME, and IFAC. Visit her website here.

Linda B. Smith is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. Smith earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Smith is the author of more than 100 publications on cognitive and linguistic development in young children.
Her central theoretical question is the study of developmental process and mechanisms of change. Her work focuses on early changes in perception, language, and action and how those changes in these areas support each other particularly around the age (12 months to 24 months) that children break into language. Her research takes a systems approach, seeking to understand how multiple components interact over nested time scales and levels of analysis and how, in so doing, they yield an individual’s developmental path. Click here to visit her lab website.