Feb 16, 2005 - Claremont, Calif. -

Manuela M. Veloso, professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, will discuss her research in an address, "Teams of Autonomous Robots: Perception, Cognition and Action" at Harvey Mudd College on Wednesday, Feb. 23, at 7 p.m.

The lecture will be held in Galileo Auditorium, 301 Platt Blvd. (formerly 12th St.), and is free and open to the public. A dessert reception in the Galileo foyer will follow the talk.

"Several researchers have invested significant effort studying multi-robot systems," Veloso said. "Robot soccer, as a pioneering multi-robot task, has offered a concrete challenging research testbed. In robot soccer, a team of multiple robots faces an uncertain and dynamic environment created by a team of opponent robots."

Veloso has researched robot soccer developing single-robot and multi-robot perception, cognition, and action algorithms. To form an effective team of robots, individual robots need to be robust. Veloso has directed the development of effective object recognition, localization and behavior-based algorithms. In addition, to achieve a reliable team of robots, she does research on team coordination strategies, team response to a dynamic world, behavior recognition, opponent modeling and multiagent learning. In her talk, Veloso will present contributions to addressing these multi-robot challenges.

Veloso is professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. She received her Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon in 1992 and a B.S. degree in electrical engineering in 1980 and an M.Sc. in electrical and computer engineering in 1984 from the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Lisbon, Portugal.

Veloso researches in the area of artificial intelligence. Her long-term research goal is the effective construction of teams of intelligent robots where cognition, perception, and action are combined to address planning, execution and learning tasks, in particular in uncertain, dynamic and adversarial environments.

Professor Veloso is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and she was awarded an NSF Career Award in 1995 and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997. She will be program co-chair of AAAI-05 conference, and program chair of IJCAI-07, the 2007 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Professor Veloso's Web page http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mmv/ includes a list of her publications and further information.

Veloso's lecture is part of The Dr. Bruce J. Nelson '74 Distinguished Speaker Series, which was created by Nelson's family to honor the memory of the late HMC alumnus. For more information about Bruce J. Nelson and the series, visit the Web site at: www.hmc.edu/speaker/.