About the Speaker

Manuela M. Veloso is Herbert A. Simon Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.  She has courtesy Professor appointments in the Robotics Institute, in the Machine Learning Department, in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and in the Mechanical Engineering Department. Professor Veloso received her Licenciatura in 1980 and her MSc in Electrical Engineering in 1984, both from the Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal. She also received an MA in Computer sCience from Boston University in 1986, and a PhD in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in 1992.

Professor Veloso founded and directs the CORAL research laboratory, for the study of multiagent systems where agents Collaborate, Observe, Reason, Act, and Learn. Professor Veloso is Fellow of IEEE, Fellow of AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science), and Fellow of AAAI (Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence). She is the President-Elect of AAAI and she was the President of the RoboCup Federation for the last three years, and of which she continues to be a member of the Board of Trustees. Professor Veloso was recently recognized by the Chinese Academy of Sciences as Einstein Chair Professor. She also received the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award for her contributions to agents in uncertain and dynamic environments, including distributed robot localization and world modeling, strategy selection in multiagent systems in the presence of adversaries, and robot learning from demonstration. Professor Veloso is the author of one book on "Planning by Analogical Reasoning" and editor of several other books. She is also an author in over 280 journal articles and conference papers.

Symbiotic Autonomy: Robots, Humans, and the Web

We envision ubiquitous autonomous mobile robots that can help and cohabitate with humans. Such robots are still far from common, as our environments offer great challenges to robust robot perception, cognition, and action. We introduce a symbiotic robot autonomy, in which the robots are aware of their limitations and can proactively ask humans, the web, and other robots for help when in need. I will present our CoBot robots, which are collaborative robots that perform service tasks for humans in our multi-floor buildings. In their symbiotic autonomy, the CoBot robots have already navigated for more than 100km in our buildings without supervision, and relying on the humans in the environment, the web and crowdsourcing when they autonomously realize their perceptual, cognitive, and actuation limitations.