Matthew Walter is Associate Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC). Previously he worked as Research Scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research focuses on advanced perception algorithms that endow robots with a rich awareness of their surroundings and the ability to interact safely and naturally with humans in unstructured environments. He is interested in algorithms that take as input multi-modal observations of a robot's surround (e.g., laser range data, image streams, and speech) and infer properties of the objects, places, people, and events that comprise a robot's environment, at a level of abstraction necessary to realize command and control mechanisms that are both intuitive and safe.

Matthew received his Ph.D. from the Joint Program between MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in relation to his research, which considered the problem of robot localization and mapping (i.e., SLAM) within large unknown environments.