CISE/Hariri Distinguished Speaker Marc Raibert, Executive Director, AI Institute; Founder, Boston Dynamics

Making Robots Smarter in Body in Mind

Robot hardware is getting better and better, robot perception improves on almost a daily basis, and their athletic skills are advancing by leaps and bounds. But robots still lack cognitive intelligence that would make them easier to use, safer around people, and more productive. In this talk Raibert will review progress at dynamic robots, then discuss a new research institute that is working to combine the athletic capabilities of robots with more cognitive intelligence.

Marc Raibert is the Executive Director of The AI Institute and founder of Boston Dynamics. He is a life-long roboticist, starting his robotics career over 50 years ago as a graduate student at MIT, where he wrote software that learned the dynamics of a robot manipulator. He spent 18 years as an academic researcher and tenured faculty at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. He founded the Leg Laboratory, a lab that helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots and that set the stage for his team’s work on dynamic robots. He spent 30 years leading Boston Dynamics, one of the most influential pure-play robotics research organizations in the world, having produced robots such as BigDog, Atlas and Stretch, and that now delivers Spot and Stretch robots to users around the world. In 2022 Raibert founded The AI Institute, a research institute focused on fundamental development that will lead to future generations of intelligent robots. Raibert is a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, was inducted into the US National Academy of Engineering in 2008, was named Pioneer in Robotics by IEEE in 2022, received the Engelberger Award in Technology 2022, was in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023, and is receiving the IEEE Robotics and Automation Award in 2025. Raibert is highly visible in the robotics and AI community, having given numerous keynote lectures and interviews, including TED, 60 Minutes, Turing Institute, ICRA, IROS, WebSummit, WRC, Wired 25, MARS, REMARS, and others. Two of Raibert’s robots were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2008 and 2012.

Faculty Host: John Baillieul, Distinguished Professor of Engineering, BU

Student Host: Beste Oztop