George A. Bekey (19 June 1928 – 17 October 2024) was an American roboticist and the professor of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California.
Bekey was born in Bratislava on 19 June 1928,[1] before immigrating at the beginning of World War II to Bolivia before moving to the United States five years later at the age of 17 in 1945.
He was also affiliated with the College of Engineering at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, where he taught a course on world religions.
One of his later books is Autonomous Robots: From Biological Inspiration to Implementation and Control from MIT Press.
[4][5] Later, he concerned himself with the ethics and social aspects of robots as they play more of a role in different aspects of human life, realising an edited text[6] bringing together some of the key thinkers in the field including James Hughes, Selmer Bringsjord, Kevin Warwick, Peter Asaro and Noel Sharkey.