Profile

Manuela M. Veloso holds a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico, a master’s degree in Computer Science from Boston University and a master’s degree and a PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.
She spent his academic career at Carnegie Mellon University, in the Department of Computer Science, and as head of the Machine Learning Department. She is currently Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita. She is a member of the Diaspora Council and collaborates with Portuguese researchers under the CMU-Portugal program.
Her research is in the area of artificial intelligence (AI), focusing on autonomous intelligent agents with perception, cognition, and action. She has supervised 48 doctoral students and contributed new algorithms for planning, continuous learning, and coordination in robot group systems. She co-founded RoboCup, an initiative dedicated to the study of teams of agents in adverse environments, such as robot soccer, which continues to attract thousands of students around the world. She has also contributed to the development of service robots in buildings, with a new symbiotic autonomy, in which robots respond to requests for navigation services for transportation and guidance, while at the same time requesting help from humans to overcome their limitations, and learning from the help received.
Manuela Veloso is a Fellow of the professional associations in her field, AAAI, AAAS, ACM and IEEE. She was President of the AAAI. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, USA, and a corresponding member of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences.
In 2018, she was invited to create an artificial intelligence research center at JPMorganChase. She recruited a team of 100 researchers. She has hundreds of publications, now also in AI and Finance, www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv. She has been consistently invited to speak on AI in academic and industrial settings, impacting a wide range of audiences.