Steve has had a wide-ranging career as a scientist, university professor, author, software architect, and entrepreneur. He received a Ph.D. in Physics from UC Berkeley, and published Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics based on his thesis. At Thinking Machines, he co-developed Star Lisp, the programming language for the massively parallel Connection Machine. He was a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana where he co-founded the Center for Complex Systems Research. He wrote the three-dimensional graphics portion of Wolfram Research's Mathematica program as one of the original seven developers. At the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, he led an international team in developing the object-oriented programming language Sather. He also developed a variety of novel neural network techniques and machine learning algorithms and built systems which learned to read lips, control robots, and learn grammars. He is the founder and president of Self-Aware Systems, founded to develop a new kind of software that programs itself.