Daniela Rus

Daniela Rus (born 1963 in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) has directed MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory — the largest research lab at MIT — since 2012. A 2002 MacArthur fellow, she has spent decades building the field’s strangest and most inventive machines: self-reconfiguring modular robots, soft robotic fish, ingestible origami robots, and self-driving vehicles.

The heart and the chip

In 2024 Rus published two unabashedly optimistic books with co-author Gregory Mone: The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots, and The Mind’s Mirror, on what AI can do for human cognition. Her thesis is that humans (the heart) and machines (the chip) are complements, with robots supplying strength, reach, and precision while people supply judgment and purpose. She confronts the dark side directly — the same superpowers, she has warned, “also empower the supervillains” — but argues the answer is steering the technology, not stopping it.

Rus is also a builder in the commercial arena: she co-founded Liquid AI, the MIT spinout commercializing the “liquid neural network” architecture her lab invented — compact, adaptive models that run efficiently on devices — which raised a $250 million round led by AMD in late 2024. Between the lab, the books, and the startup, she is among the most emphatic institutional voices for a bright robotic future.