Mauldin, Michael: Bio

Dr. Michael L. Mauldin is adjunct research computer scientist at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 1989, and his M.S. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon in 1983. He received his B.A. in Mathematical Science and Computer Science from Rice University in 1981. He has authored 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural language, autonomous information agents, information retrieval and expert systems.

Dr. Mauldin was an independent director of Lycos, the search engine company he founded in 1994.

He was a principal investigator on the Informedia Digital Video Library project (one of the NSF/ARPA/NASA Digital Libraries awardees), and was a co-principal investigator on ARPA's TIPSTER data extraction project.

His Internet agent ``Julia'' was a finalist in the first four Loebner Prize competitions, a restricted form of the Turing test.

His hobbies include robot fighting and Jeep camping.

His 220 pound robot Polar Vortex is the number two ranked heavyweight robot according to Botrank. He and his family are "Team Toad", and started fighting robots in November, 2000 with the second season of Comedy Central's BattleBots.

When not fighting robots, he enjoys driving his 2011 Jeep Wrangler Sahara through the trails of the desert southwest with a camping trailer in tow. Click to see the Team Toad Jeep page.