2009 Presenter Full Presenter List

Hod Lipson

AI Robot Designer

Hod Lipson's relatively broad spectrum of research projects focus on what he considers to be two grand challenges of engineering. First, can we design machines that can design other machines? Second, can we make machines that can make other machines? Biological life has answered these challenges in ways that the best teams of human engineers have not. Thus, Hod uses primarily biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insight into biology.

Lipson and his team at Cornell University have created robots that can decide how they would like to move, have a sense of how they appear and can construct other robots like themselves. In 2001, he joined the departments of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and the faculty of Computing & Information Science of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He is also a member of the Computer Science and Computational Biology graduate fields at Cornell.