Robotics Summit keynote speaker Daniela Rus wins 2025 Edison Medal
Each year, the IEEE Awards Board selects a distinguished group of individuals to receive its highest honors. The organization said it recognizes these recipients for their exceptional achievements and significant contributions to technology, society, and the engineering profession. This year, it named Daniela L. Rus as its Edison Medal recipient for her sustained leadership and pioneering contributions to modern robotics.
Rus is currently the director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL). Her research interests include robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is also the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers claimed it is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. It has more than 460,000 members in over 190 countries. The IEEE Medals are the highest awards in the hierarchy of IEEE Awards bestowed by the organization.
Rus will keynote the Robotics Summit & Expo, which will be at the Boston Convention and Exposition Center from April 30 to May 1, 2025. Rus’ keynote “Welcome to the Era of Physical Intelligence” takes place May 1 from 10-10:45 AM. She said physical intelligence is achieved when AI’s power to understand text, images, signals, and other information is used to make physical machines such as robots intelligent. To achieve effective physical intelligence, we need energy-efficient AI systems that can run reliably on robots, sensors, and other edge devices. Rus’ keynote will discuss the challenges of transformer-based foundation AI models. She will also introduce alternative physics-based models and explain how they achieve performance efficiently.
The Robotics Summit & Expo will bring together over 5,000 developers focused on building robots for aerospace and defense, healthcare, logistics, manufacturing, and other markets. Attendees will gain insights into the latest enabling technologies, engineering best practices, and emerging trends.
More about Daniela Rus’ accomplishments
Daniela Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and IEEE. Shei is also a member of the National Academy of Engineers, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Rus earned her Ph.D. in computer science from Cornell University. Prior to joining MIT, she was a professor in the Computer Science Department at Dartmouth College.
Much of Rus’ research focuses on the science of networked, distributed, or collaborative robotics. In particular, she said she is interested in how many machines can collaborate to achieve a common goal. Distributed networked robot systems consist of multiple robots that are connected by communication. In these systems, the robots interact locally with the environment. The objective is for the system as a whole to have guaranteed global behavior.
In addition, Rus said her research addresses the development of algorithms and systems that enable collaboration, couple communication, control, and perception tightly, are scalable and generally independent of the number of agents in the system, and have provable guarantees.
In addition to her work with MIT, Rus is a senior visiting fellow at MITRE and a member of several boards, including that of Vecna Robotics. She is the director of Liquid AI, Symphony AI, Symbotic, and Themis AI. In 2017, she received the Engelberger Robotics Award from the Robotic Industries Association.
