James Kuffner is a Research Scientist at Google and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. He received a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 1999. He spent two years as a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo working on software and planning algorithms for humanoid robots. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2002. He has published over 100 technical papers and received the Okawa Foundation Award for Young Researchers in 2007.