Matt Mason has spent 50 years conducting research in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, starting as a student in the MIT AI Lab where he earned the BS, MS, and PhD degrees. He spent much of his career at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute, where he was the founder and co-director of the Manipulation Laboratory, and for ten years served as the Director of the Robotics Institute. Matt’s group studied the basic physics governing grasping and manipulation, and its application to autonomous manipulation systems. Mason is a Fellow of the AAAI, AAAS, ACM, and IEEE, and a winner of the IEEE R&A Society’s Pioneer Award and the IEEE Technical Field Award in Robotics and Automation (aka the R&A Prize).