Today, Katz works at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he is the principal research scientist at the ComputerScience and ArtificialIntelligence Laboratory.
Rodney Brooks, Rethink Robotics founder and former director of the MIT Computer and Science and ArtificialIntelligence Lab, said he hoped Baxter represented a "new concept in manufacturing".
When the Stanford computerscience professor offered a graduate-level course on artificialintelligence for free online last year, 160, 000 people from 190 different countries signed up.
Artificialintelligence as a branch of computerscience enjoyed a surge of interest and attention in the mid-1980s and there was a corresponding surge of medical applications.