Pattie Maes

Pattie Maes is a Belgian scientist and professor in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she founded and directs the Media Lab Fluid Interfaces group. Born in Brussels in 1961, she earned her bachelor's degree and doctorate in artificial intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and did postdoctoral work at MIT with Rodney Brooks and Marvin Minsky. In 1991 she launched the Software Agents group at the Media Lab, whose Ringo music recommendation system became Firefly, the first commercial music recommendation website and an early example of collaborative filtering. Her areas of expertise are human-computer interaction, intelligent interfaces and ubiquitous computing, and her current group works on technology that augments human cognition. She has edited several books on autonomous agents.