Eric Paulos is the director of the CITRIS Invention Lab, which he co-founded in 2012.
Paulos is also the founder and director of the Hybrid Ecologies Lab, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS) at UC Berkeley, chief learning officer for the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation, a co-director of the Swarm Lab, and faculty within the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM).
Previously, Paulos held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute and in the Entertainment Technology Center. At CMU he founded and directed the Living Environments Lab.
Prior to CMU, Paulos was a senior research scientist at Intel Research in Berkeley, California, where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group, which was challenged to employ innovative methods to explore urban life and the future fabric of emerging technologies across public urban landscapes. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in critical making, design research, urban computing, sustainability, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies and intimate media.
Paulos is a leading figure in the field of urban computing, coining the term in 2004, and a regular contributor, editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. He received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley, where he helped launch a new robotic industry by developing some of the first internet teleoperated robots, including space browsing helium-filled blimps and personal roving presence devices (PRoPs).
Paulos is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit and a frequent collaborator with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories. His work has been exhibited at the InterCommunication Center (ICC) in Japan, Ars Electronica, ISEA, SIGGRAPH, the Dutch Electronic Art Festival (DEAF), SFMOMA, the Chelsea Art Museum, Art Interactive, LA MOCA, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the ZKM and Southern Exposure, and in performance for the opening of the Whitney Museum’s 1997 biennial exhibition.
Research interests: cosmetic computing, citizen science, new making renaissance, critical making culture, robotics, DIY and DIYBio, epidermal electronics, urban computing, collaborative consumption, new media, energy materiality.