Mark D. Gross is Professor of Computer Science and directs the ATLAS Institute at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His interests include design methods, modular robotics, computationally enhanced construction kits and crafts, sketch tools and applications, and physical computing. Gross is co-founder with former students in three local companies spun out of his university research laboratories. Gross has taught computational design at CU at the University of Washington Seattle, and at Carnegie Mellon University. In the 1980s worked at Atari’s Research Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He earned his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where, in the 1970s, he worked at the Artificial Intelligence Logo Laboratory and the Architecture Machine Group, as well as a stint programming optical character recognition at Kurzweil Computer Products.