Doing for Our Robots What Nature Did for Us

Doing for Our Robots What Nature Did for Us

Abstract: We, as robot engineers, have to think hard about our role in the design of robots and how it interacts with learning, both in "the factory" (that is, at engineering time) and in "the wild" (that is, when the robot is delivered to a customer). I will share some general thoughts about the strategies for robot design and then talk in detail about some work I have been involved in, both in the design of an overall architecture for an intelligent robot and in strategies for learning to integrate new skills into the repertoire of an already competent robot.

Bio: Leslie Pack Kaelbling is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. She has previously held positions at Brown University, the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International, and at Teleos Research.

Prof. Kaelbling has done substantial research on designing situated agents, mobile robotics, reinforcement learning, and decision-theoretic planning. In 2000, she founded the Journal of Machine Learning Research, a high-quality journal that is both freely available electronically as well as published in archival form; she currently serves as editor-in-chief.

She is an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, a former member of the AAAI Executive Council, the 1997 recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, a trustee of IJCAII and a fellow of the AAAI.

She received an A. B. in Philosophy in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science in 1990, both from Stanford University.