Manuela Veloso | |
|---|---|
 Manuela Veloso at theAlan Turing Centenary Conference inManchester in 2012 | |
| Born | Manuela Maria Veloso (1957-08-12)August 12, 1957 (age 68) |
| Alma mater | Instituto Superior Técnico -University of Lisbon (MSc) Boston University (MA) Carnegie Mellon University (PhD) |
| Awards | National Science Foundation CAREER Award (1995) ACM Fellow (2016) AAAI Fellow (2003)[1] |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Artificial Intelligence Robotics Planning Learning Multi-agent systems[2] |
| Institutions | JPMorgan Chase Carnegie Mellon University |
| Thesis | Learning by Analogical Reasoning in General Purpose Problem Solving (1992) |
| Doctoral advisor | Jaime Carbonell[3] |
| Doctoral students | Astro Teller Peter Stone[3] |
| Website | www |
Manuela Maria Veloso (born August 12, 1957) is the Head ofJ.P. Morgan AI Research[4] &Herbert A. Simon UniversityProfessor Emeritus[5] in the School of Computer Science atCarnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Head of the Machine Learning Department.She served as president ofAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and the co-founder and a Past President of theRoboCup Federation. She is a fellow ofAAAI,Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE),American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), andAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics.[2][6]
Manuela Veloso received herLicenciatura andMaster of Science degree inelectrical engineering from Lisbon'sInstituto Superior Técnico in 1980 and 1984 respectively. She then attendedBoston University, and received aMaster of Arts incomputer science in 1986.[citation needed] She moved toCarnegie Mellon University and received herPh.D. in computer science there in 1992. Her thesisLearning by Analogical Reasoning in General Purpose Problem Solving was supervised byJaime Carbonell.[3]
Shortly after receiving her Ph.D., Manuela Veloso joined the faculty of theCarnegie Mellon School of Computer Science as anassistant professor. She was promoted to the rank ofassociate professor in 1997, and full professor in 2002. Veloso was a visiting professor at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology for the academic year 1999–2000, a Radcliffe Fellow of theRadcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,Harvard University for the academic year 2006–2007, and a visiting professor atCenter for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) atNew York University (NYU) for the academic year 2013–2014. She is the winner of the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award. She was the Program Chair for IJCAI-07, held January 6–12, 2007, in Hyderabad, India and was program co-chair of AAAI-05, held July 9–13, 2005, in Pittsburgh. She was a member of the editorial board of CACM and the AAAI Magazine. She is the author of one book on Planning by Analogical Reasoning. As of 2015, Veloso has graduated 32 PhD students.[3][7] She was appointed as the head of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department[8] in 2016.[9]
Veloso describes her research goals as the "effective construction of autonomous agents where cognition, perception, and action are combined to address planning, execution, and learning tasks".[10] Veloso and her students have researched and developed a variety of autonomous robots, including teams of soccer robots, and mobile service robots. Her robot soccer teams have been RoboCup world champions several times, and the CoBot mobile robots have autonomously navigated for more than 1,000 km in university buildings.[11] In a November 2016 interview, Veloso discussed the ethical responsibility inherent in developing autonomous systems, and expressed her optimism that the technology would be put to use for the good of humankind.[12]
Veloso is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards.[15]
