Ken Goldberg

Kenneth Yigael Goldberg (born 1961 in Ibadan, Nigeria) is an American roboticist known for algorithmic robotics and robot-mediated telepresence. He earned dual bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering and economics summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984 and a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990, where his dissertation developed the first algorithm for orienting polygonal parts and proved it works for any part up to rotational symmetry. He taught at the University of Southern California from 1991 to 1995 and was a visiting faculty member at MIT in 2000 before joining the University of California, Berkeley, where he chairs the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, holds the William S. Floyd Jr. Distinguished Chair in Engineering, and holds joint appointments in electrical engineering and computer sciences, art practice and the School of Information, as well as an appointment in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of California, San Francisco. He is credited with building the first robot controllable over the web in August 1994, and created the Telegarden, an internet-connected garden that remote visitors could tend for nine continuous years. He co-founded the African Robotics Network in 2012, co-founded and edits IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, holds eight United States patents, and was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2005 after receiving the NSF Young Investigator Award in 1994 and the Joseph F. Engelberger Robotics Award in 2000.