Peter Lucas has shaped MAYA as the premier venue for human- and information-centric product design and research.

He co-founded MAYA in 1989 to remove disciplinary boundaries that cause technology to be poorly suited to the needs of individuals and society.

Peter received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from Cornell University, where he studied educational and cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin and was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Science at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie at the intersection of advanced technology and human capabilities. He is currently developing a distributed device architecture that is designed to scale to nearly unlimited size, depending primarily on market forces to maintain tractability and global coherence.

Peter holds 15 patents and has co-authored a book on letter and word perception. He was the founding chair of Three Rivers Connect — an initiative of senior business and civic leaders that promotes the development of civic computing in the Pittsburgh region. Peter was also a member of the Networked Systems of Embedded Computing study committee, part of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council. He coauthored their seminal book on the topic of pervasive computing entitled, Embedded, Everywhere: A Research Agenda for Networked Systems of Embedded Computers. Since 2000, he has been an Adjunct Professor at the CMU HCII Institute.


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