Manuela M. Veloso

Education Manuela Veloso received her Licenciatura and Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Lisbon's Instituto Superior Técnico in 1980 and 1984 respectively. She then attended Boston University, and received a Master of Arts in computer science in 1986. She moved to Carnegie Mellon University and received her Ph.D. in computer science there in 1992. Her thesis Learning by Analogical Reasoning in General Purpose Problem Solving was supervised by Jaime Carbonell. She was appointed as the head of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department in 2016.

Veloso describes her research goals as the "effective construction of autonomous agents where cognition, perception, and action are combined to address planning, execution, and learning tasks". Veloso and her students have researched and developed a variety of autonomous robots, including teams of soccer robots, and mobile service robots. Her robot soccer teams have been RoboCup world champions several times, and the CoBot mobile robots have autonomously navigated for more than 1,000 km in university buildings. In a November 2016 interview, Veloso discussed the ethical responsibility inherent in developing autonomous systems, and expressed her optimism that the technology would be put to use for the good of humankind.

Honors and awards National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1995. Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997. 2003 AAAI Fellow 2016 ACM Fellow, for "contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, in particular in planning, learning, multi-agent systems, and robotics."

Veloso is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards.