Dr. Matthias Scheutz

The New York Times article The Art of Building a Robot to Love said

Marvin the robot, a supporting player in “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, speaks in the dull monotone of the chronically depressed. In the “Star Wars” films, C-3PO is a bundle of anxiety and neuroses. And in “2001: A Space Odyssey”, the HAL 9000 is creepily homicidal.
 
These are all fictional machines, far removed from real robots of the present or even those that scientists envision for the future. Yet they raise questions: If robots can act in lots of ways, how do people want them to act?…
 
“If robots are to interact with us”, said Matthias Scheutz, director of the artificial intelligence laboratory at Notre Dame, “then the robot should be such so that people can make its behavior predictive”. That is, people should be able to understand how and why the robot acts.

Dr. Matthias Scheutz is Director of the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Laboratory at the University of Notre Dame.
 
Matthias is investigating the utility of affective states for the control of agent behavior, the extent to which simple affective control states can be and will evolve, and the condition under which affect ceases to be beneficial (e.g., compared to non-affective, deliberative control) and is also investigating the mechanisms underlying the organization and processing of a second language in humans using neural networks. Read his full list of research projects!
 
He edited Computationalism: New Directions and coauthored ADE – An Architecture Development Environment for Virtual and Robotic Agents in International Journal of Artificial Intelligence Tools, Many is More: The Utility of Simple Reactive Agents with Predictive Mechanisms in Multiagent Object Collection Tasks in Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, A Real-time Robotic Model of Human Reference Resolution using Visual Constraints in Connection Science, and Effects of Morphosyntactic Gender Features in Bilingual Language Processing in Cognitive Science. Read his full list of publications!
 
Matthias earned a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1995 and a Joint Ph.D. in Cognitive Science and Computer Science from the Indiana University Bloomington in 1999.