Pattie Maes is an associate professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directed the MIT Media Lab

MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a laboratory of MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Devoted to research projects at the convergence of design, multimedia and technology, the Media Lab has been widely popularized since the 1990s by business and technology publications such as Wired and Red Herring for a...

's Fluid Interfaces group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. She currently acts as the associate Department Head for the Media, Arts and Sciences Department. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds bachelor's and PhD degrees in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

The Vrije Universiteit Brussel is a Flemish university located in Brussels, Belgium. It has two campuses referred to as Etterbeek and Jette.The university's name is sometimes abbreviated by "VUB" or translated to "Free University of Brussels"...

 in Belgium.

Maes' areas of expertise are human-computer interaction, intelligent interfaces and ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing

Ubiquitous computing is a post-desktop model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities. In the course of ordinary activities, someone "using" ubiquitous computing engages many computational devices and systems...

. Maes is the editor of three books, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences.

She has received several awards: Newsweek

Newsweek

Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...

 magazine named her one of the "100 Americans to watch for" in the year 2000; TIME Digital selected her as a member of the Cyber-Elite (the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world); the World Economic Forum

World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva, best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland....

 honored her with the title Global Leader for Tomorrow; Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica

Ars Electronica is an organization based in Linz, Austria, founded in 1979 around a festival for art, technology and society that was part of the International Bruckner Festival. Herbert W. Franke is one of its founders. It became its own festival and a yearly event in 1986. Its director until 1995...

 awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council.

Maes is married to computer graphics researcher Karl Sims

Karl Sims

Karl Sims is a computer graphics artist and researcher, who is best known for using particle systems and artificial life in computer animation....

.

Trivia

• In 1997, Maes was listed in People Magazine's annual 50 Most Beautiful People feature.

Books

• Designing Autonomous Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to Engineering and Back. MIT Press, 1991, ISBN 0-262-63135-0
• Artificial Life IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, Rodney Brooks & Pattie Maes, MIT Press, 1994, ISBN 0-262-52190-3

External links

• Home page at MIT
• Fluid Interfaces research group at MIT