Marc Raibert PhD ’77 is the executive director and founder of The AI Institute, an organization that addresses the most important and challenging questions in robotics and AI with the aim of developing future generations of robots and intelligent machines. He is a life-long roboticist, starting his robotics career over 45 years ago as a graduate student at MIT, where he wrote software that learned the dynamics of a robot manipulator. Marc spent 18 years as an academic researcher and faculty at JPL, Carnegie Mellon University, and MIT. He founded the Leg Laboratory, a lab that helped establish the scientific basis for highly dynamic robots and that set the stage for the ground-breaking work done at Boston Dynamics.

Before starting the AI Institute, Raibert spent 27 years leading Boston Dynamics, arguably the most influential pure-play robotics research organization in the world, having produced robots such as BigDog, Atlas, Stretch, and Spot, and that now delivers robot products to users around the world. Raibert is highly visible in the robotics world, having given numerous keynote lectures and interviews, including TED, 60 Minutes, Turing Institute, WebSummit, Wired 25, MARS, REMARS, and many others. He is a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI, was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, was recently named a Pioneer in Robotics by IEEE, and received the Engelberger Award in Technology in 2022. Even better, two of his robots were inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame in 2008 and 2012.