Pattie Maes (born 1961) is a Belgian scientist. She is a professor in MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directed the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

's Fluid Interfaces Group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. She served for several years as both the head and associate head of the Media Lab's academic program. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds bachelor's degree in computer science and PhD degree in AI from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. She did post-graduate work at MIT under

Rodney Brooks Rodney Allen Brooks (born 30 December 1954) is an Australian robotics, roboticist, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science, author, and robotics entrepreneur, most known for popularizing the behavior based robotics, actionist approach to ro ...

and Marvin Minsky. Maes launched the Software Agents Group at the Lab in 1991. One of the main projects from the group was the Helpful Online Music Recommendations (HOMR), later renamed “Ringo” in 1994. Users would rate a random sampling of music artists on a scale from 1 to 7. This creates a user profile. The system would look for similar users preference profiles, and email recommendations to the users of what the users might also enjoy. This was an early example of collaborative filtering

recommender system A recommender system (RecSys), or a recommendation system (sometimes replacing ''system'' with terms such as ''platform'', ''engine'', or ''algorithm'') and sometimes only called "the algorithm" or "algorithm", is a subclass of information fi ...

. It led to Firefly, the first commercial music recommendation website, launched in 1995-10. It was launched from the Lab, since the existing companies doubted that collaborative filtering was commercially viable. It was an early example of

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

. Maes' areas of expertise are human–computer interaction, intelligent interfaces and ubiquitous computing. Maes is the editor of three books, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. Currently she leads the Fluid Interfaces group at the Lab, which focuses on technological cognitive augmentation. She has received several awards:

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magazine named her one of the "100 people for the new century"; TIME Digital selected her as a member of the ''Cyber-Elite'' (the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world); the

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honored her with the title Global Leader for Tomorrow;

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awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the ''Lifetime Achievement Award'' by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council. A former model in Belgium, Maes was listed in

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's annual 50 Most Beautiful People feature in 1997. Maes is married to computer graphics researcher Karl Sims.

Books

* ''Designing Autonomous Agents: Theory and Practice from Biology to Engineering and Back''. MIT Press, 1991, * ''Artificial Life IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems'', Rodney Brooks & Pattie Maes, MIT Press, 1994,

References

External links

Home page
at MIT Media Lab
MIT Media Lab research group
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Maes, Pattie Belgian women computer scientists Scientists from Brussels 1961 births Living people Vrije Universiteit Brussel alumni MIT School of Architecture and Planning faculty MIT Media Lab people 20th-century Belgian scientists 21st-century Belgian scientists