Ken Goldberg

Kenneth Y. Goldberg (1961- ) is a Professor of Industrial Engineering and OperationsResearch (IEOR), with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering andComputer Science (EECS), and in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also the Director of the "Berkeley Center for New Media". He is an artist, writer, inventor, and researcher in the field of robotics and automation.

Background

Goldberg was born in Ibadan, Nigeria and grew up in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He received a BS in Electrical Engineering and BS in Economics, "summa cum laude", from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984. Goldberg also received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University in 1990. He then taught in the department of computer science at the University of Southern California from 1991-1995 and was visiting faculty in 2000 at the MIT Media Lab. [http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/art/cv-art.html]

Career

Goldberg and his students develop new algorithms for Feeding, Fixturing,Grasping and Assembly, with an emphasis on minimalist approaches thatrequire a minimum of sensing and complexity. For his PhD dissertation,Goldberg developed the first algorithm for orienting (feeding) polygonalparts and proved that the algorithm can be used to orient any part up torotational symmetry. He also patented the kinematically yielding gripper,a new robot gripper that complies passively to hold parts securelywithout sensing. Named IEEE Fellow in 2005, Goldberg co-founded the IEEETransactions on Automation Science and Engineering and his work has resultedin six United States patents.

Goldberg is credited with developing the first robot with webinterface (August 1994). His subsequent project, the Telegarden,allowed remote visitors, via the Internet, to view, water, and plantseeds in a living garden. This project was online continuously fornine years in the lobby of the Ars Electronica Center. Goldbergis a leading researcher in networked telerobotics and hasdeveloped a series of collaborative tele-operation systems such as theTele-Actor, in which a human moves through a remote environment guidedby remote participants via the Internet.

Goldberg is Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, andCulture Colloquium, established in 1997. This monthly speaker seriesbrings artists, writers, and curators such as Billy Klüver,
David Byrne and Bruno Latour to give evening lectures and isfree and open to the public. Goldberg is editor of several books,including The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology inthe Age of the Internet (MIT Press, 2000), which explores what isknowable at a distance.

For his research, Goldberg was awarded the National Science FoundationYoung Investigator Award in 1994, the National Science FoundationPresidential Faculty Fellowship in 1995, the Joseph F. EngelbergerRobotics Award in 2000, the IEEE Major Educational Innovation Award in2001.

As an artist, Goldberg's work has been exhibited at the
Whitney Biennial, Venice Biennale, Pompidou Center (Paris), Walker ArtCenter, Ars Electronica (Linz Austria),File festival (Sao Paulo), ZKM (Karlsruhe), ICC Biennale(Tokyo), Kwangju Biennale (Seoul), Artists Space, and The Kitchen (NewYork). He has held visiting positions at San Francisco Art Institute,
MIT Media Lab, and the Art Center College of Design.

"The Tribe", a short film he co-wrote with his wife, Tiffany Shlain (who also directed and produced the film) was selected for the2006 Sundance Film Festival and the 2006 Tribeca Film Festival.Goldberg's Ballet Mori project, performed by the San Francisco Ballet, won an Isadora Duncan Award in 2006.

External links

* [http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg Ken Goldberg's UC Berkeley homepage]
* [http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/art Ken Goldberg's Artwork]
* [http://automation.berkeley.edu Berkeley Automation Lab homepage]
* [http://www.ieee.org/t-ase/ IEEE Transactions on Automation Science]
* [http://atc.berkeley.edu/ Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium]
* [http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/g/Goldberg:Kenneth_Y=.html Goldberg's publications] at the Digital Bibliography & Library Project
* [http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/goldberg.html The Robot in the Garden (MIT Press/Leonardo Books)]