Luc Steels (born in 1952) is a Belgian scientist and artist. Steels is considered a pioneer of Artificial Intelligence in Europe who has made contributions to expert systems, behavior-based robotics, artificial life and evolutionary computational linguistics. He was a fellow of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies ICREA associated as a research professor with the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (UPF/CSIC) in Barcelona. He was formerly founding Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and founding director of the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris. Steels has also been active in the arts collaborating with visual artists and theater makers and composing music for opera.
Biography
Steels obtained a master's degree in Computer Science at MIT, specializing in AI under the supervision of Marvin Minsky and Carl Hewitt. He obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Antwerp with a thesis in computational linguistics on a parallel model of parsing. In 1980, he joined the Schlumberger-Doll Research Laboratory in Ridgefield (US) to work on knowledge-based approaches to the interpretation of oil well logging data and became leader of the group who developed the Dipmeter Advisor which he transferred into industrial use while at Schlumberger Engineering, Clamart (Paris). In 1983, he was appointed tenured professor in Computer Science with a chair in AI at the Free University of Brussels (VUB). The same year he founded the VUB Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and became the first chairman of the VUB Computer Science Department from 1990 to 1995. The VUB AI Lab focused initially on knowledge-based systems for various industrial applications (equipment diagnosis, transport scheduling, design) but gradually focused more on basic research in AI, moving at the cutting edge of the field.
In 1996 Steels founded the Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) in Paris and became its acting director. This laboratory was a spin-off from the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Tokyo directed by Mario Tokoro and Toshi Doi. The laboratory targeted cutting-edge research in AI, particularly on the emergence and evolution of grounded language and ontologies on robots, the use of AI in music, and contributions to sustainability. The CSL music group was directed by Francois Pachet and the sustainability group by Peter Hanappe.
In 2011 Steels became fellow at the Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and research professor at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, embedded in the Evolutionary Biology Laboratory (IBE). There he pursued further his fundamental research in the origins and evolution of language through experiments with robotic agents.
Throughout his career Steels spent many research and educational visits to other institutions. He was a regular lecturer at the Theseus International Management Institute in Sophia Antipolis, developed courses for the Open University in the Netherlands, was Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin during the years 2015-16 and 2009–10, Fellow at Goldsmiths College London (computer science department) from 2010, visiting scholar or lecturer at La Sapienza University Rome, Politecnico di Milano, the universities of Ghana and Beijing (Jiaotong University) among others.
Steels was member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and is elected member of the Academia Europaea, and the Royal Belgian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten), where he serves as chairman of the Natural Science section.
He received several awards including the best paper award at the European Conference in AI (in 1982), the prestigious Franqui chair lectures at the University of Leuven (Belgium) (2018) and the EurAI Distinguished Service Award, presented every two years to an individual who has made exceptional contributions to the AI community in Europe.