Manuela Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)

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Manuela Veloso - Head of JP Morgan Chase AI Research and Herbert A. Simon university professor emeritus - received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa on the 5th October 2021.

Photo : Manuela Veloso © Michael Matias
Manuela Veloso © Michael Matias

Born on August 12th 1957, Manuela Manuela Veloso is one of the leading international experts in artificial intelligence and robotics. She received her Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico de Lisboa in 1984, and obtained a Master of Arts in Computer Science from Boston University in 1986, before defending her thesis “Learning by Analogical Reasoning in General Purpose Problem Solving” and obtaining her Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1992. She joined the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science as an assistant professor, and became a full professor in 2002.

Research, collaboration, distinctions

In 2009, she was awarded with the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, before writing a book on planning by analogical reasoning. Appointed head of Carnegie Mellon’s Machine Learning Department in 2016, she is head of artificial intelligence research at JP Morgan Chase since 2018. She served as President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014 and is a co-founder and past president of the RoboCup Federation.

The RoboCup was launched in 1996 to stimulate robotics research through a historic challenge: to develop a team of fully autonomous robots capable of defeating the human world champion soccer team.

Now, it is one of the most important scientific and technological events in the world in terms of research and training (45 nations). With her students, Manuela Veloso has developed a wide variety of autonomous robots, soccer robot teams and mobile service robots. Her robotic soccer teams have been multiple RoboCup world champions, and the CoBot mobile robots developed by her group have autonomously navigated over 1,000 km in university buildings.

Author of hundreds of articles and books in the most prestigious scientific journals (H index 78, over 30,000 citations), Manuela Veloso describes her research goals as "the efficient realisation of autonomous agents where cognition, perception and action are combined to address planning, execution and learning tasks" and expresses her optimism about the use of technology for the benefit of humanity.

The DHC for Prof. Veloso was proposed by Olivier Ly, professor, director of the Rhoban research team at LaBRI, specialised in autonomous robotics and humanoid robotics.