Team Toad: Michael "Fuzzy"

Driver of FrostBite, Iceberg and TadPole

Education: PhD in Artificial Intelligence

Occupation: retired

Hobbies: flying stunt planes, snorkelling, travelling

Although he is retired, Dr. Michael L. Mauldin manages to keep busy. He is an adjunct research computer scientist at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He has a master's and a doctorate degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon, and a bachelor's degree from Rice University.

He has authored two books and a dozen technical papers on natural language, autonomous information agents, information retrieval and expert systems.

Dr. Mauldin is Managing Director of Virtual Personalities, Inc., and is the President of the Marsupial Group of aviation companies: Sloth Air, Inc., Bandicoot Air, Inc., and Wombat Air Realty. He was also the founder of Lycos, Inc., the Internet search engine.

His Internet agent ``Julia'' was a finalist in the first four Loebner Prize competitions, a restricted form of the Turing test. His current project is building a squadron of combat robots for Comedy Central's BattleBots competition.