The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science presents:
Leslie Pack Kaelbling - Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Making robots behave
Abstract
The fields of AI and robotics have made great improvements in many individual subfields, including in motion planning, symbolic planning, probabilistic reasoning, perception, and learning. Our goal is to develop an integrated approach to solving very large problems that are hopelessly intractable to solve optimally. We make a number of approximations during planning, including serializing subtasks, factoring distributions, and determinizing stochastic dynamics, but regain robustness and effectiveness through a continuous state-estimation and replanning process. This approach is demonstrated in three robotic domains, each of which integrates perception, estimation, planning, and manipulation.
Speaker's biography
Leslie Pack Kaelbling is the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has made research contributions to decision-making under uncertainty, learning, and sensing with applications to robotics, with a particular focus on reinforcement learning and planning in partially observable domains.
She holds an A.B in philosophy and a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, and has had research positions at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) International and Teleos Research and a faculty position at Brown University. She is the recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation Presidential Faculty Fellowship, the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) Computers and Thought Award, and several teaching prizes and has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She was the founder and served for 10 years as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research.