Romanian appointed head of the artificial intelligence department at MIT

Newsroom 31/05/2012 | 14:23

Romanian Daniela Rus, 48, was appointed on May 23rd as director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), being the first woman to serve in this position.

Rus served as associate director of CSAIL from 2008 to 2011, and has been co-director of CSAIL’s Center for Robotics since 2005.

She also directs CSAIL’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory.

She spearheaded research in programmable matter and distributed robotics, her team having built robots that can tend a garden, bake cookies from scratch, cut a birthday cake, fly in swarms without human aid to perform surveillance functions, and dance with humans.

Before coming to MIT in 2003, Rus was a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, where she founded and directed two laboratories in robotics and mobile computing.