Daniela Rus, director of MIT CSAIL and co-founder of Liquid AI, has led research on compact, nature-inspired neural networks and embodied intelligence to advance energy-efficient AI systems.

In another major step, Liquid AI partnered with Mercedes-Benz in April to deploy its models in select North American cars, expanding in-car AI capabilities.

With a career spanning more than three decades in robotics and intelligent systems, Rus aims to broaden the forms and functions robots can take.

Rus also co-founded Venti Technologies, which focuses on automating logistics and has moved over 200,000 containers in the Port of Singapore using autonomous vehicles.

In 2020, her team developed a tiny neural network inspired by a worm’s nervous system that could steer a car along a lane, outperforming conventional networks in task efficiency.

By 2023, this line of research helped spin out Liquid AI, which has raised more than $250 million to develop nature-inspired, efficiency-focused AI models.

Rus champions the science and engineering of intelligence through embodied intelligence, exploring diverse robotic forms such as modular, soft, origami, self-folding designs, and even ingestible robots.

Liquid AI also announced a multiyear partnership with Shopify in November to power Shopify’s search functionality with its models.