Dr. Michael L. Mauldin is adjunct research computer scientist at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 1989, and his M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 1983. He received his B.A. in Mathematical Science and Computer Science from Rice University in 1981. He has authored 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural language, autonomous information agents, information retrieval and expert systems.
Dr. Mauldin is Chairman of the Board of Conversive, Inc., a Los Angeles company developing photo-realistic talking heads for consumer computer interaction. He was also the founder of Lycos, Inc., the Internet search engine, a public company with offices in Boston, New York, and Pittsburgh. He was a principal investigator on the Informedia Digital Video Library project (one of the NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Libraries awardees), and was a co-principal investigator on ARPA's TIPSTER data extraction project. His Internet agent ``Julia'' was a finalist in the first four Loebner Prize competitions, a restricted form of the Turing test.
His current project is the Robot Club & Grille in Pittsburgh, PA...a restaurant that also holds regular robot combat competitions. He became interested in fighting robots by building several successful robots for Comedy Central's BattleBots competition.