Brian C. Williams
Professor of
Aeronautics and Astronautics
Director, Autonomous Systems Laboratory
(ASL)
Member, Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)
Member, Space Systems Laboratory
(SSL)
Phone - 253-2739 (CSAIL), 253-1678 (Aero-Astro)
Office - 32-276 (CSAIL), 33-330 (Aero-Astro)
Email - williams@mit.edu
- S.B., 1981, MIT
- S.M., 1984, MIT
- Ph.D., 1989, MIT
Research Interests
Professor Williams leads the Model-based Embedded and Robotic Systems
group, within the Computer Science
and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
(CSAIL) at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT). His research
concentrates on model-based autonomy -- the creation
of long-lived systems that explore autonomously, while commanding,
diagnosing and repairing themselves using fast, commonsense reasoning.
Current research focuses on model-based programming and cooperative
robotics: Model-based programming supports goal-directed programming
of robust explorers and everyday devices, by incorporating model-based
deductive capabilities within traditional embedded programming
languages. Cooperative robotics extends model-based autonomy to
robotic networks of cooperating space, air, land and undersea vehicles,
on Earth and on other planets.
Professor Williams received his S.B., S.M and Ph.D. in Computer Science
and Electrical Engineering at MIT, and worked at the Xerox Palo Alto
Research Center and NASA Ames Research Center, prior to joining the
faculty at MIT. He is a pioneer in the fields of qualitative
reasoning, model-based diagnosis and autonomous systems. He received a
NASA Space Act Award for Remote Agent, the first fully autonomous,
self-repairing space explorer, demonstrated onboard the NASA Deep Space
One probe in May, 1999. He was a member of the Tom Young Blue Ribbon
Team in 2000, assessing future Mars missions in light of the Mars
Climate Orbiter and Polar Lander incidents, and is currently a member of
the Advisory Council of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech.
He has won four best paper prizes for his research in diagnosis,
qualitative algebras, propositional inference and soft constraints. He
is a fellow of AAAI, has served as guest editor of the Artificial Intelligence Journal and has been on the editorial boards of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research , and MIT Press.
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