Dr. MacKenzie, President of Mobile Intelligence, received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering in 1985 and the M.S. degree in Computer Science in 1989, both from Michigan Technological University. Dr. MacKenzie started work as a Software Engineer in Allen-Bradley's (a division of Rockwell) Programmable Controller Division in Cleveland, Ohio in 1988 while making the final changes to his Master's thesis titled "Broadcasting on Three Multiprocessor Interconnection Topologies". This research investigated various communication strategies for conducting message broadcasting when using large scale parallel computers connected in three common configurations. In 1990, Dr. MacKenzie returned to school, this time to the Georgia Institute of Technology, graduating with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech in March, 1997. While at Georgia Tech, Dr. MacKenzie initiated development of the MissionLab toolset and created the graphical Configuration Editor which brought visual programming to the behavior-based robotics domain. Dr. MacKenzie designed and conducted usability tests on MissionLab which demonstrated that, with only 30 minutes of training, even people unable to program in traditional languages were able to specify complex missions using the toolset. Dr. MacKenzie is particularly interested in empowering people who are not computer programmers to use advanced computer packages in ways that traditionally require programming skills. MissionLab has been shown to achieve this goal and continues to be actively used at Georgia Tech. |