Biography for Rodney Brooks

2nd Annual MCA Business Conference
Biography for Rodney Brooks

Dr. Rodney Brooks is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, Inc. He is also a Founder, Board Member and former CTO (1991 – 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT) and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (on leave) at MIT. Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He 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 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 is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science, and a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.