The Future of Machine Intelligence

Chapter 6. Daniela Rus: The Autonomous Car As a Driving Partner

Daniela Rus is a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Rus is the first woman to serve as director of CSAIL and its predecessors—the AI Lab and the Lab for Computer Science.

Key Takeaways

• Robotics, a field with roots as far back as ancient Greece, is undergoing a period of explosive growth, driven by improvements in computational power, better sensors and new materials.

• Producing increasingly more autonomous machines requires new computational approaches to designing and fabricating functional machines at scale.

• MIT-CSAIL, in partnership with Toyota Motor Corporation, have set out to create a car that will never be responsible for a collision. This project builds on MIT’s collaborative work with the National University of Singapore, which demonstrates safe self-driving vehicles at low speeds in low-complexity environments.

Let’s start with your background.

I’m a roboticist. I started as a computer science and math major in college. Towards the end of my college career, I met John Hopcroft, who then became my Ph.D. thesis advisor. At one point, he delivered a very inspiring talk, in which he observed that many of the classical computer science problems have already been solved. Instead, it was now time for the grand applications of computer science, including, of course, robotics.

I continued on to Cornell, ...