Wei-Min Shen

Biography

Dr. Wei-Min (Weimin) Shen is the Director of Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory, the Associate Director of the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, and a Research Associate Professor in Computer Science at University of Southern California. He received his Ph.D. under Nobel Laureate Professor Herbert A. Simon and co-advisor Professor Jaime Carbonell from Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. His thesis is titled Autonomous Learning from the Environment Based on Percepts and Actions. Dr. Shen has over 25 years of research experience and his current research interests include self-reconfigurable and metamorphic systems, autonomous robots, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Life Science. He has over 100 publications in these areas. He is the recipient of a Silver-Medal Award in 1996 AAAI Robotics Competition, a World Championship Award in 1997 Middle-sized RoboCup Competition, a Meritorious Service Award at ISI in 1997, and a Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award at USC in 2003. He is the author of Autonomous Learning from Environment (W.H.Freeman), a 360-page book on how machines learn from their environment based on "surprises". He is the inventor of SuperBot, a co-inventor of CONRO, and the inventor of hormone-inspired distributed and decentralized control for self-reconfigurable systems (US Patent #006636781). He has served as chairs and committee members for international conferences and workshops in Robotics, Machine Learning, and Data Mining, and as editorial board members for scientific books and research journals. His research activities have been reported by leading scientific journals such as SCIENCE (9/26/1997 and 8/8/2003) and NATURE (5/28/2004), and media press such as CNN, PBS, Discovery, and other newspapers and magazines in the world. His research has been supported by NSF, AFOSR, DARPA, ARO, and NASA. He is the conference program chair for the 7th International Conference on Autonomous Intelligent Systems, and has served on the program committee for AAAI, AAMAS, KDD, ICRA, IROS, and other international technical conferences.