Hans Moravec
From Free net encyclopedia
Hans Moravec (born November 30 1948 in Austria) is a permanent resident research professor at the Robotics Institute (Carnegie Mellon) of Carnegie Mellon University known for his work on robotics, artificial intelligence, and writings on the impact of technology. Moravec also is a futurist with many of his publications and predictions focusing in on transhumanism. Among other work, Moravec has developed techniques in machine vision for determining the region of interest (ROI) in a scene. It should be noted that other ROI techniques exist, including the patents of Sherman de Forest (U.S.), and the machine vision / image processing articles by Sobel.
Moravec earned a PhD from Stanford University in 1980 for a TV-equipped robot which was remote controlled by a large computer. The robot was able to negotiate cluttered obstacle courses. Other achievements in the field of robotics has been the discovery of new approaches for robot spatial representation such as 3D occupancy grids. He also developed the idea of bush robots.
Moravec was a cofounder of SEEGRID Corporation in 2003 which is a robotics company with one of its goals being to develop a fully autonmous robot capable of navigating its environment without human intervention.
Moravec is a Canadian U.S. Permanent Resident.
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Publications
Moravec has published many articles and papers on the fields of computer graphics, multiprocessors, robotics, space travel and other speculative areas generally referred to as futurism or transhumanism.
Books
In his book Mind Children, Moravec outlines Moore's law and predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in this regard, which basically supports Isaac Asimov's literature, in that the robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030-2040.
In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, published in 1998, he further considers the implications of evolving robot intelligence.
Popular culture references
- The self-replicating sentient cyborgs in Dan Simmons' science fiction novels Ilium and Olympos are called "moravecs".