Very Personal Computers

Abstract

Apart from anything else, our next speaker is an amazingly productive person—she has a list of books and papers as long as your arm. She began life, so to speak, at the Free University in Brussels, Belgium, where after a number of years of reflection she got her doctorate in Computational Reflection. In 1989, she took a visiting professorship at MIT and never really went home. You can tell how serious she was about it—Brussels being the food capital of the world. In 1991, she accepted a faculty position at MIT Media Lab where she’s now associate professor. She’s also Sony Corporation Career Development Professor of Media, Arts, and Sciences. So far she’s worked on intelligent office systems, problem-solving strategies, object-oriented languages and computational reflection, and her most recent work is on a theory of action selection and learning in an autonomous agent using a distributed model.