About the Editor/Author Dr. C. L. Mason

Dr. Mason has been an AI researcher at NASA Ames, U.C. Berkeley and
Stanford University. While she was at NASA Ames,
she realized AI was like rocket science for solving our
environmental problems. She created the
first U.S. and international AI workshops that brought together the
two fields of Artificial Intelligence and Environment Sciences.
With a growing sense of urgency in the world about the environment
and recognizing there had been no further substantial U.S. activity
in the
area of AI and Environment for 16 years since her work at
NASA, she decided to create the book. The purpose of sharing it now
is
to bring this work out of the shadows (an archive at MIT) so that
others who might be in a hurry to pursue the use of AI for
sustainability and
infrastructure problems can benefit from wisdom of those who have
already built key AI systems and to more deeply know some of
the
work of the pioneers in that special community.
Dr. Mason feels that each of the sixty researchers that appear in
the book are heroes of our future.
Among her achievements, Dr. Mason
-created the first Computer Science department in the Australian
Outback, with Anna Lichtenberg
-was part of the NASA Ames team that sent the first undersea
teleoperated robot to Antarctica (you could drive it from above the
ice hole and back at NASA Ames in California)
-created (one of) the first software agent languages for emotion and
mental state, EOP - Emotion Oriented Programming
-started the new field of Artificial Compassion
-conducted (the first?) robot fashion show to demonstrate the
problem of Appearance and Reality in Artificial Intelligence
Dr. Mason's work is inspired through cross-disciplinary
research. She received her Ph.D. through an inter-campus
program with the
Dept. of Applied Sciences through the University of
California, Davis and the EECS and Psychology Departments. at
University of California, Berkeley. Her Ph.D. research
on using AI to automatically analyze data for Comprehensive
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was conducted at Lawrence
Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL) with the Treaty Verification Group in
Earth Sciences Department and the Signal and Image Processing Group
of the Engineering Research
Division. The work received the American Association for
Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
Award for Outstanding Student Contribution to the Field of
Artificial Intelligence. The spark for her work on
Artificial Compassion was the discovery of plasticity in brain and
immune
sciences together with user experience studies and her experiences
with psychophysiophilosophy with patients at Stanford
Hospital. Her mentors have included
Lotfi Zadeh (father of fuzzy sets), John McCarthy (father of
AI), and Zi Sheng Wang (Chinese/Tibetan medicine).
At Berkeley, she studied
with Eleanor Rosche and Leo Postman in the cognitive psychology
department, her advisor at LLNL was Rowland Johnson.
Dr. Mason can be found in the Computer History Museum (Oral
Archives) and the Australian National Museum for Pioneering
Women in the Outback. She was a key researcher on the
New York Times Bestselling "How To Build A Mind" and has
crossed the Pacific Ocean between the U.S. and Australia 4 times.