Professor Williams is a Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT and the director of the Model-Based Embedded and Robotic Systems Group. He received his S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from MIT, and worked at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center and the NASA Ames Research Center before joining the MIT faculty.
He received a NASA Space Act Award for Remote Agent, the first fully autonomous, self-repairing space explorer, demonstrated on board the NASA Deep Space One probe in 1999. He served on the Tom Young Blue Ribbon Team assessing NASA's Mars missions after the mission failures of 2000, and serves on the Advisory Council of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He is an AAAI Fellow and has received four best paper prizes for his work on diagnosis, qualitative algebras, propositional inference, and soft constraints.
His research within CSAIL focuses on model-based autonomy: the creation of long-lived systems that explore autonomously while commanding, diagnosing, and repairing themselves using fast, commonsense reasoning. This work spans model-based programming and cooperative robotics for space, air, land, and undersea vehicles.