Michael Loren Mauldin


Michael Loren "Fuzzy" Mauldin is a retired computer scientist and the inventor of the Lycos web search engine.
He has written 2 books, 10 refereed papers, and several technical reports on natural-language processing, autonomous information agents, information retrieval, and expert systems. He is also one of the authors of Rog-O-Matic and Julia, a Turing test competitor in the Loebner Prize.
Verbot, a defunct chatbot program, is based on Mauldin's work.
Mauldin is an active competitor in the Robot Fighting League.

Early life and education

Mauldin was born on March 23, 1959 in Dallas, Texas to Jimmie Alton Mauldin and Marilyn Jean Taylor. In 1981, he received a bachelor's degree from Rice University. In 1983, he received master's degree and in 1989, he received a Ph.D., both from Carnegie Mellon University. His Ph.D. advisor was Jaime Carbonell.

Career

In 1994, while working at CMU on the Informedia Digital Library project, Mauldin created Lycos from 3 pages of code. Along with CMU, he sold 80% of the company to CMGI for $2 million.
In 1996, Lycos was the fastest company ever to become a public company via an initial public offering. Mauldin sold his stake in Lycos during the dot-com bubble and retired.
In 1997, he left Lycos to form Conversive with Peter Plantec. The company was an artificial intelligence software company that created self-animated computer-generated human characters. He remained on the board of directors of the company until 2013, when it was acquired by Avaya.
In 2000, after watching BattleBots, Mauldin built a robot and became a successful competitor in robot combat.
In August 2015, he became a member of the board of directors of Lycos, now owned by Suresh Reddy.
In 2017, he appeared on Robot Wars as the team captain for the "rest of the world" team.

Patents

Mauldin is the inventor or co-inventor of the following 4 patents:
Mauldin is married to Debbie and they have grown children. In addition to robot combat, they enjoy traveling via recreational vehicle and driving his Jeep Wrangler Sahara through the desert. They owned an 81-acre ranch near Austin, Texas. Mauldin was recruited by Google but opted to stay retired.