Today, Katz works at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the principal research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

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Rodney Brooks, Rethink Robotics founder and former director of the MIT Computer and Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, said he hoped Baxter represented a "new concept in manufacturing".

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Artificial intelligence as a branch of computer science enjoyed a surge of interest and attention in the mid-1980s and there was a corresponding surge of medical applications.

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