Luc Steels studied computer science and electrical engineering at MIT (USA) and linguistics and philosophy at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He is a professor of computer science and artificial intelligence at the University of Brussels (VUB) where he founded the VUB AI laboratory in 1983. End of 1996, he founded the Sony Computer Science Laboratory (CSL) in Paris as a sister lab of Sony CSL-Tokyo. This laboratory conducts fundamental research in areas that may significantly impact the future of Information Technology. Steels has published a large amount of scientific papers and a dozen books, including several books on the origins of intelligence in autonomous robots.
Steels is interested in the fundamental problem how cognition may have originated. He has been conducting a series of experiments in which robotic agents develop sensory-motor competence by interacting with the environment and each other. More recently he has been focusing on the origins of language as a way of bootstrapping these robots towards cognitive levels. By viewing language as a complex adaptive system, significant results have already been achieved in the domains of phonetics, lexicon, meaning and syntax.