Biography
James Kuffner is a Roboticist at the Toyota Research Institute and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999, and was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo working on software and planning algorithms for humanoid robots. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2002. He has published over 125 technical papers, holds more than 40 patents, and received the Okawa Foundation Award for Young Researchers in 2007. In 2009, James joined Google as part of the initial engineering team building Google’s self-driving car. He is known for introducing the term "Cloud Robotics" in 2010 to describe how network-connected robots could take advantage of distributed computation and data stored in the cloud. In 2014, he was appointed head of Google’s Robotics division, which he co-founded along with Andy Rubin. In 2016, he joined the newly created Toyota Research Institute as the Area Lead for Cloud Computing.