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Daniela Rus is the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Deputy Dean of Research for the Schwarzman College of Computing at MIT. She earned her PhD in Computer Science from Cornell University. Before joining MIT in 2003, Rus served as a professor of computer science at Dartmouth College, where she founded and directed the Dartmouth Robotics Laboratory starting in 1994. Since arriving at MIT, she has taken on key leadership roles, including associate director of CSAIL from 2008 to 2011, co-director of CSAIL's Center for Robotics since 2005, and director of CSAIL since 2012. She also directs the Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center, focusing on AI applications to intelligent vehicles. Rus holds positions such as MITRE senior visiting fellow, USA expert member for the Global Partnership on AI, member of the board of advisers for Scientific American, and member of the Defense Innovation Board.
Rus's research specializations include robotics, artificial intelligence, and data science, centered on the science and engineering of autonomy to integrate machines pervasively into human life for cognitive and physical support. Her work advances machine reasoning, learning, and adaptation in complex human environments, intuitive human-robot interfaces, and efficient tools for robot design and fabrication. Broad applications encompass transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, environmental monitoring, underwater exploration, smart cities, medicine, and in-home tasks like cooking. Notable innovations feature soft robotic creatures for aquatic exploration, modular self-assembling robotic boats, ingestible origami robots like MiniSurgeon, and liquid neural networks. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, fellow of ACM, AAAI, and IEEE, member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, recipient of the 2017 Engelberger Robotics Award from the Robotics Industries Association, and 2024 John Scott Award co-recipient. Key publications include 'Design, Fabrication, and Control of Soft Robots' (Nature, 2015), 'On-demand high-capacity ride-sharing via dynamic trip-vehicle assignment' (PNAS, 2017), and 'Coresets for Differentially Private k-Means Clustering and Applications to Privacy in Mobile Sensor Networks' (Sensys, 2017). Her contributions have profoundly influenced robotics by expanding robot capabilities and fostering human collaboration.
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