Luc Steels studied linguistics at the University of Antwerp (Belgium) and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA).
His main research field is Artificial Intelligence covering a wide range of intelligent abilities, including vision, robotic behavior, conceptual representations and language. In 1983 he became a professor of computer science at the University of Brussels (VUB) and in 1996 he founded the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris and became its first director.
Currently he is ICREA Research Professor at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology (CSIC,UPF).