Michael Benjamin is a Principal Research Scientist at MIT in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. His research focus is on autonomy algorithms and software for unmanned marine vehicles. In 2005 he founded an open source project named moos-ivp.org comprising dozens of marine autonomy applications including the IvP Helm for autonomous decision making, and COLREGS autonomy on unmanned surface vessels. His software is used on many different types of unmanned marine vehicles around the world. He received the BS and MS degrees in computer science and cognitive science from Rensselaer, and the MS and PhD degrees in computer science from Brown University. Prior to coming to MIT, he was a research scientist at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center and was the 2005 NAVSEA Scientist of the Year. Since the Spring of 2012 he has developed and taught a course in unmanned marine vehicle autonomy at MIT to undergraduates and graduate students and has led the startup of a new laboratory facility for marine autonomy on the Charles River on the MIT campus.