Wei-Min Shen

Roles & Affiliations:
Dr. Wei-Min Shen is a Research Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California (USC) and an Associate Professor of Computer Science Practice at the Viterbi School of Engineering. He serves as Director of the Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory, Associate Director of the USC Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems, and Research Leader at the Information Sciences Institute (ISI).

Education:
PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University (1989), advised by Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon and co-advisor Jaime Carbonell.

Research Interests:
Dr. Shen focuses on autonomous robotics, self-reconfigurable systems (e.g., SuperBot), machine learning, artificial intelligence, and life science applications. His work emphasizes active model abstraction, surprise-based learning, and bio-inspired control mechanisms like the Digital Hormone Model (DHM). He has pioneered projects such as SuperBot, StarCell, and SOLAR, supported by grants from NSF, DARPA, NASA, and others.

Awards & Recognition:
- Silver-Medal Award in AAAI Robotics Competition (1996)
- World RoboCup Championship (1997)
- Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award (USC, 2003)
- 7 U.S. patents for robotics innovations.

Teaching & Service:
Courses taught include CS561 (AI), DSCI-553 (Data Mining), and CS360 (AI). He has chaired conferences like ICRA, IROS, and served on editorial boards for journals like IEEE Transactions on Mechatronics. His research has been featured in Science, Nature, and media outlets like CNN, BBC, and NHK.

Labs & Projects:
Leads the Polymorphic Robotics Lab at ISI, developing modular robots (e.g., SuperBot) and autonomous learning frameworks. Projects include Surprise-Based Learning (SBL), CONRO, and DataCrystal.