Harold Cohen. US artist and inventor Harold Cohen (born 1928) stands next to a painting by his brainchild - a robot that can compose and paint its own original artworks. Cohen was born in the UK and educated at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. In 1969, having established his reputation as a talented British artist, he left the UK to become a professor at the University of California in San Diego, USA, where he combined his knowledge of art with a growing interest in computers and artificial intelligence. The result of his labor is a massive computer program called AARON, which invents its own original compositions and controls a robot that transfers them to paper.