Lynn Andrea Stein is Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science and the Director of the Computers and Cognition Laboratory at the newly established Franklin W. Onlin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. Prior to becoming one of Olin's first faculty members, Stein spent a decade on the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Computer Science.

Stein's research focuses on the role that interaction plays in both computational and cognitive processes; her projects include the construction of an artificial humanoid and an intelligent room, philosophical and pragmatic work from knowledge representation to the semantics of cognition, and most recently co-authorship of foundational documents for the semantic web. Her contributions include logical theories of inheritance and temporal reasoning, the semantics of sharing in object-oriented programming languages, "imagination" and other architectures for cognitive robotics, and the Cog and Haystack systems and DAML-O/OWL web language. She is a recognized leader in computer science and engineering education, where her work includes the development of an innovative introductory CS curriculum (radically rethinking CS 101) and the founding of Olin College.

• Challenging the Computational Metaphor: Implications for How We Think: Von Neumann serial computation has been our field's central metaphor.
  It has even influenced how we think brains work.  But the sequentialist metaphor isn't right for brains.  It isn't even right for what computers do. I...
• Designing A Small Footprint Curriculum for Computing: We describe an innovative computing curriculum that combines elements of computer science, engineering and design. Although it is tailored to the constraints we face at Olin college, it contains elements that are applicable to the design of a ...
• Making Meaning on the Web: The World Wide Web is increasingly a venue in which we conduct commerce, build relationships, and live out our lives. Underneath the
  everyday activity of the web lurks another layer: computers manipulating symbols and bits to create the i...
• Neo-Modular Systems: Architectural Principles for Cognitive Robotics: Traditional computational systems are generally organized around  principles of modular-functional decomposition.  In contrast, cognitive robotics has produced a large number of apparently non-modular systems.  These systems rely on op...
• Radically Rethinking CS1: Perhaps the most fundamental idea in modern computer science is that of interactive processes. Computation is embedded in a (physical or virtual) world; its role is to interact with that world to produce desired behavior. While von Neum...
• Reinventing Engineering Education: Building Olin College: Educational institutions evolve slowly.  In 2000, the FW Olin Foundation launched a new college with the explicit intent of designing a new kind of engineering education from a clean slate.  This talk will explore the key insights gained in...