Peter Stone is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group (LARG) within the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Austin,as well as associate department chair and Director of Texas Robotics. He is also an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, AAAI Fellow, ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, AAAS Fellow, Fulbright Scholar, and co-founder of Cogitai, Inc. Recently, Stone became the head of Sony AI America.
Stone co-authored the papers that first proposed the robot soccer challenges around which Robocup was founded. He is a Vice President of the International RoboCup Federation and was a co-chair of RoboCup-2001 at IJCAI-01. Peter Stone was a Program Co-Chair of AAMAS 2006, was General Co-Chair of AAMAS 2011, and was a Program Co-Chair of AAAI-14. He has developed teams of robot soccer agents that have won RoboCup championships in the simulation (1998, 1999, 2003, 2005, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017), in the standard platform (2012) and in the small-wheeled robot (1997, 1998) leagues. He has also developed agents that have won auction trading agents competitions (2000, 2001, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2013.)
His main research interest in AI is understanding how we can best create complete intelligent agents. He considers adaptation, interaction, and embodiment to be essential capabilities of such agents. Thus, his research focuses mainly on machine learning, multiagent systems, and robotics. To him, the most exciting research topics are those inspired by challenging real-world problems. He believes that complete successful research includes both precise, novel algorithms and fully implemented and rigorously evaluated applications. His application domains have included robot soccer, autonomous bidding agents, autonomous vehicles, autonomic computing, and social agents.