Artificial Intelligence Expert Manuela Veloso Receives Carnegie Mellon’s Simon Chair in Computer Science

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science Professor Manuela Veloso has been named the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science.

The chaired professorship is named after the late Herbert A. Simon, university professor and Nobel Laureate who helped to found the field of artificial intelligence and establish Carnegie Mellon as one of the foremost computer science institutions in the world. University Professor Raj Reddy held the Simon Chair in Computer Science from the time of its creation in 1992 until April 2005, when he was awarded the Mozah Bint Nasser Chair of Computer Science and Robotics, a gift from the Qatar Foundation.

“It is especially fitting for Manuela to hold this chair, given her many contributions to the field of artificial intelligence,” said Randal E. Bryant, dean of the School of Computer Science.

Veloso’s research focuses on the effective construction of teams of intelligent agents that combine cognition, perception, and action to address planning, execution and learning tasks—particularly in uncertain, dynamic and adversarial environments. To illustrate these concepts, Veloso develops teams of robot soccer agents that participate in the International RoboCup competitions (www.robocup.org).

“Building successful soccer robots requires solving many hard problems: computer vision, multiagent planning and locomotion, and she does this in a way that motivates and excites students and spectators,” Bryant said.

Veloso and her students have participated in RoboCup since its inception in 1997, competing in the simulation league, small robot league and the league for Sony’s AIBO legged robots. They have been world champions several times and have consistently placed among the top teams. Since 2004, she and her colleagues have investigated a new human-robot soccer game with teams of humans and Segway robots.

Veloso is vice president of the RoboCup Federation. She was the general chair of the international RoboCup 2001 in Seattle, the first time the event was held in the United States. Veloso helped to create and served as general chair of the first RoboCup American Open, which was held at Carnegie Mellon in 2003.

In the most recent RoboCup U.S. Open, held last month in Atlanta, her teams brought home four trophies. In the AIBO league, the team of mostly undergraduate students was the best of the U.S. entrants, losing only to a team from Germany in a field of eight. In the small robot league, Carnegie Mellon entrants took honors as the best U.S. team and for first place overall.

Veloso is an alumna of Carnegie Mellon, where she received her doctor’s degree in computer science in 1992. She earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1980 and 1984, respectively.

She is the editor of RoboCup-99: Robot Soccer World Cup III (Springer, 2000), Symbolic Visual Learning (Oxford Press, 1997), Case-Based Reasoning Research and Development (Springer Verlag, 1995), and the author of Planning and Learning by Analogical Reasoning (Springer Verlag, 1994). She has also authored more than 150 technical papers that have been presented at conferences and published in journals.

Veloso is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Veloso served as program co-chair of AAAI-05, the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, which was held in Pittsburgh. She will be program chair of IJCAI-07, the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, to be held in India in January 2007.

Her honors include a 1995 National Science Foundation Career Award, Carnegie Mellon’s Finmeccanica Chair in 1995 and the university’s Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997.

A reception honoring Veloso and her achievements will be held later this year.

Contact:
Anne Watzman
aw16@andrew.cmu.edu
(412)268-3830
Byron Spice
bspice@cs.cmu.edu
(412)267-9068