Written By: Audrey Woods
Director of CSAIL Professor Daniela Rus dreams of a future where “robots are so integrated in the fabric of human life that they become as common as smartphones are today,” she says on her website. After earning her bachelor’s in computer science from the University of Iowa, she went to Cornell University for graduate school. There she attended a talk by John Hopcroft where he spoke about how the time had come for the grand applications of computer science. This led her to join his group to work on robotics, writing her PhD thesis on fine motion planning for dexterous manipulation—in other words, improving how robots grasp objects. After graduation, she joined the Dartmouth College Computer Science Department as a professor, transferring to MIT in 2004. In 2012, she became the director of CSAIL, where she has overseen a number of major projects and research initiatives such as the AI Accelerator Program, Machine Learning Applications, Future of Data, Trust, and Privacy, and the Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center.
Today, Professor Rus’s research focus is reimagining robots by studying the science and engineering of intelligence, with the long-term objective of bringing about her vision of ubiquitous robots augmenting work, supporting those with cognitive or physical impairments, and generally improving lives. Her research can be broadly split into two categories, studying the “mind” and “body” of robots. Toward creating the artificial intelligence that will power future robotics, Professor Rus is increasing the ability of robots to reason, learn, and adapt to complex tasks with the invention of innovative neural network models like liquid time-constant networks and also the introduction of new machine learning methods like training in simulation. On the hardware side, she’s studying concepts like soft robots, robot compilers, and robots that self-configure.
Professor Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow; a fellow of ACM, AAAI, and IEEE; a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; a Schmidt AI 2050 fellow; and the recipient of the 2017 Engelberger Robotics Award from the Robotics Industries Association. She’s been named one of the Top 10 Women in AI and the Top 10 World’s Most Influential Women Engineers and was awarded the 2023 IEEE RAS Technical Award and the 2019 IEEE RAS Pioneer Award. Beyond her role as Director, Professor Rus also leads the CSAIL Distributed Robotics Laboratory.
Speaking about her work, Professor Rus says, “I love the fact that here at CSAIL, everyone lives in the future.” She imagines CSAIL as a prophet for the future of computing and a place where the dreams of researchers come true.
