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.