Pattie Maes is an associate professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directs the Media Lab's Interactive Experience research group. Previously, she founded and ran the Software Agents group. Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds bachelor's and PhD degrees in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Her areas of expertise are human-computer interaction, artifical life, artificial intelligence, collective intelligence, and intelligence augmentation.

NEWTON, Mass., May 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoesis Studios announced today it has appointed David Blohm to its Board of Directors and Professor John D. Mayer, Professor Pattie Maes and Kevin Mowrer to the company's Strategic Advisory Board.

According to Ellen Bossert, chief executive officer, Zoesis, "These visionaries will ensure that Zoesis is synonymous with meaningful, enriching, educational products that appeal to parents and children alike. Their talent will further support the company's mission of bringing seemingly alive, emotional digital characters to children on a broad basis."

JB: Let's start with Firefly and work backwards. What are you doing now?

MAES: I started out doing artificial intelligence, basically trying to study intelligence and intelligent behavior by synthesizing intelligent machines, I realized that what I've been doing in the last seven years could better be referred to as intelligence augmentation, so it's IA as opposed to AI. I'm not trying to understand intelligence and build this stand-alone intelligent machine that is as intelligent as a human and that hopefully teaches us something about how intelligence in humans may work, but instead what I'm doing is building integrated forms of man and machine, and even multiple men and multiple machines, that have as a result that one individual can be super-intelligent, so it's more about making people more intelligent and allowing people to be able to deal with more stuff, more problems, more tasks, more information. Rather than copying ourselves, I'm building machines that can do that.