ROBOTICS-2026

W.F. Lawless (6/17/2025) retired in 1981 from the USMC-R as a Lt.Col aviator (approx. 1700 flight hours: A4-E, H-34, RF-8, 130 carrier landings). In 1977, he became a mechanical engineer with the Department of Energy’s (DOE) facility at its Savannah River Site, SC, where he was in charge of nuclear waste management, but in 1983, he blew the whistle on DOE’s mismanagement of its military radioactive wastes. For his dissertation, he wrote about the mistakes made by large organizations with world-class scientists and engineers. After his PhD in 1992, DOE invited him to join its board at DOE-SRS, where he coauthored the first and numerous other recommendations on environmental remediation to treat DOE’s mismanagement of its radioactive wastes (e.g., the regulated closure in 1997 of the first two high-level radioactive waste tanks). His research today is on autonomous human-machine teams. With the Naval Research Lab, DC, he has co-edited 12 books on AI (Springer 2016; 2017; CRC 2018; Elsevier 2019; 2020 [Elsevier nominated the latter, "Human-Machine Shared Contexts," to ASIS&T for its Information Science book of the year award for 2020]; Springer, 2021; Springer LNCS, 2021; Frontiers in Physics, 2023; Elsevier, 2024; 2024; 2025; 2026 proposed; Entropy 2025). He co-organized a special issue on “human-machine teams and explainable AI” for AI Magazine (2019; 1st editorial). He authored/co- authored 300+ peer-reviewed publications (e.g., https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202307.0607/v1). He co-organized thirteen AAAI symposia at Stanford (2025: Current and Future Varieties of Human-AI Collaboration). For Frontiers in Physics, he co-organized: "Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Structure and Performance of Interdependent Autonomous Human Machine Teams and Systems” (2nd editorial). He co-organized AHFE’s 2023 SIG: Data dependency. He co-organized Entropy's Special Issue, 2025: "An Entropy Approach to the Structure and Performance of Interdependent Autonomous Human Machine Teams and Systems” (3rd editorial); he has 9 award nominations, the top article in AHFE 2024, and he has been chosen for a distinguished faculty research award at NRL, summer 2025; he has had numerous invited articles and talks.