Ruzena Bajcsy is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director Emeritus of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Science (CITRIS). Her current research areas include artificial intelligence; biosystems and computational biology; control, intelligent systems, and robotics; graphics and human-computer interaction, computer vision; and security. From November 2001 to 2004, she served as director of CITRIS, an initiative bringing together the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz with private industry to develop ways to use information technology to affect people’s daily lives. Prior to joining Berkeley, Dr. Bajcsy headed the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate at the National Science Foundation where she managed a $500 million annual budget. As a former faculty member of the University of Pennsylvania, she also served as the Director of the University’s General Robotics and Active Sensory Perception Laboratory, which she founded in 1978, and chaired the Computer and Information Science department from 1985 to 1990.
Dr. Bajcsy is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine as well as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute of Electronic and Electrical Engineers, and the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In 2001, she received the ACM/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Allen Newell Award, and was named as one of the 50 most important women in science in the November 2002 issue of Discover Magazine. She also received the Computing Research Associates Distinguished Service Award in April of 2003 and the ACM Distinguished Service Award in February 2004. Dr. Bajcsy has served on numerous advisory boards and committees, including the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC) from 2003-2005.
In 2008 she was the recipient Benjamin Franklin Medal for Computer and Cognitive Sciences.
In 2009 she has won the 2009 Anita Borg Technical Leadership Award.
She is a recipient of 2010 IEEE Robotics and Automation Pioneer award.
Dr. Bajcsy has authored over 225 articles in journals and conference proceedings, 25 book chapters, and 66 technical reports and has served on many editorial boards.
She received her Master’s and Ph. D. degrees in electrical engineering from Slovak Technical University in 1957 and 1967, respectively, and a Ph. D. in computer science from Stanford University in 1972.