BIOGRAPHIES:
Rodney A. Brooks |
B. Jack Copeland |
David Gelernter |
Ray Kurzwell
Rodney Brooks is Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics. He is also Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corp. 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. Dr. Brooks is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a member of the National Academy of Engineering (in the USA), and a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science.
http://people.csail.mit.edu/~brooks
B. Jack Copeland received his D.Phil. in Philosophy from the University of Oxford (1979) for research on modal and nonclassical logics. He is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Turing Archive for the History of Computing at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he has taught since 1985 and is Chair of the School of Philosophy and Religious Studies. His publications include The Essential Turing (Oxford University Press, 2004); Alan Turing’s Automatic Computing Engine (Oxford University Press, 2005); Colossus: The Secrets of Bletchley Park's Codebreaking Computers (Oxford University Press, 2006); Logic and Reality (Oxford University Press, 1996); and Artificial Intelligence (Blackwell, 1993, 2nd edition forthcoming); and he has published more than 100 articles on the philosophy and history of computing, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical logic. He is currently writing a book on Turing's philosophical and logical work, Turing's Machines, and also a book on the philosophy of religion. Professor Copeland has held a variety of visiting professorships at institutions internationally. He is founding editor of The Rutherford Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, and serves on the editorial boards of various philosophical journals. In 2000 he received a Marsden award from the Royal Society of New Zealand, and in 2003 the Scientific American Sci/Tech Web Award for his on-line archive,
www.AlanTuring.net.
http://www.phil.canterbury.ac.nz/people/copeland.shtml
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David Gelernter is professor of computer science at Yale, chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies, contributing editor at the Weekly Standard and member of the National Council of the Arts. He's the author of several books, technical articles, essays, art criticism, and fiction. The "tuple spaces" introduced in Carriero and Gelernter's Linda system (1983) are the basis of many computer-communication and distributed programming systems worldwide. "Mirror Worlds" (1991) "foresaw" the World Wide Web (Reuters, 3/20/01) and was "one of the inspirations for Java." The "lifestreams" system, first implemented by Eric Freeman at Yale, is the basis for Mirror Worlds Technologies' software. "Breaking out of the box" (NY Times magazine, '97) forecast and described the advent of less-ugly computers. Gelernter's essays are widely anthologized. He is the author of "The Muse in the Machine" and the novels, "1939," and "Machine Beauty." His writings have been published in Commentary, ArtNews, Washington Post and many other periodicals. His recent talks include the Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, keynotes at Agenda 2003, Intl. Wireless World, PC Expo, and the 2002 Organick Lecture in Computer Science at the University of Utah.
http://www.cs.yale.edu/people/gelernter.html
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Ray Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition. Ray has successfully founded and developed nine businesses in areas of artificial intelligence. Ray's Web site,
KurzweilAI.net, is a leading resource on artificial intelligence. Ray Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the nation's largest award in invention and innovation. He also received the
1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology, from President Clinton in a White House ceremony. He has also received scores of other national and international awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He has received twelve honorary Doctorates and honors from three U.S. presidents. Ray's books include The Age of Intelligent Machines, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Four of Ray's books have been national best sellers, and The Age of Spiritual Machines has been translated into 9 languages. Ray Kurzweil's new book, published by Viking Press, is entitled The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/aboutray.html
