Luc Steels

Luc Steels is a Belgian scientist working in the field of Artificial Intelligence. He studied linguistics in Antwerp and computer science and AI at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA. In 1983 he founded the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Free University of Brussels (VUB), conducting research in knowledge representation, language processing, and robotics. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris. Since 2011 he has been a research professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA), while working at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE-UPF/CSIC) in Barcelona on AI models of language evolution. Within the sphere of art, Steels has engaged in various collaborations with artists such as Olafur Eliasson and is active in musical composition, primarily for opera. His operas explore the implications of AI in contemporary society and have premiered at the Palau de la Musica in Barcelona in 2011 and, most recently, at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2017.

As of January 2019