Dr. Stephen Omohundro
Self-Aware Systems
Biography
Dr. Stephen Omohundro's Abstract
Dr. Stephen Omohundro has had a wide-ranging career as a scientist, university professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford with Honors and Distinction in Physics and with Distinction in Mathematics. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley, and published Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics based on his thesis. At Thinking Machines Corporation, he co-developed Star Lisp, the programming language for the massively parallel Connection Machine. He was a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana where he co-founded the Center for Complex Systems Research. He wrote the three-dimensional graphics portion of Wolfram Research's Mathematica program as one of the original seven developers. At the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, he led an international team in developing the object-oriented programming language Sather. He also developed a variety of novel neural network techniques and machine learning algorithms and built systems which learned to read lips, control robots, and learn grammars. At the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, he worked on a variety of applications of AI and co-authored a patent on the PicHunter image database retrieval system. He founded Olo Software in Palo Alto to provide technology and business consulting to a variety of startups and research labs, including InterTrust Technologies, Xerox PARC, Fuji-Xerox PAL, Ask Jeeves Inc., VideoScribe, LinuxMatix, Video Memoirs, and Molecular Objects. He is the founder and president of Self-Aware Systems, founded to develop a new kind of software that programs itself.