James Kuffner

James Kuffner

Dr. James Kuffner is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Representative Director of Woven Planet Holdings, and the Chief Digital Officer and a Memb​er of the Board of Directors and Operating Officer of Toyota Motor Corporation. Dr. Kuffner also serves in executive management roles at the Woven Planet Group companies, specifically Representative Director of Woven Core, the President and Representative Director of Woven Alpha. Dr. Kuffner received a Ph.D. from the Stanford University Dept. of Computer Science Robotics Laboratory in 2000, and was a Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Tokyo. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in 2002. Dr. Kuffner was a Research Scientist and Engineering Director at Google from 2009 to 2016. He was part of the initial engineering team that built Google’s self-driving car. In 2010, he introduced the term “Cloud Robotics” to describe how network-connected robots could take advantage of distributed computation and data stored in the cloud. He was appointed head of Google’s Robotics division in 2014. He Joined the Toyota Research Institute (TRI) as CTO in 2016. He continues to serve as an Adjunct Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, and as an Executive Advisor to TRI. ​