Leslie Kaelbling

Leslie Pack Kaelbling received an A.B. in philosophy from Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry in 1983.⁠[1]

In 1990 she received a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.⁠[1]

Her earlier career included positions at the Artificial Intelligence Center of SRI International and at Teleos Research, followed by Brown UniversityBrown UniversityBrown University is a private nonprofit research university in Providence, Rhode Island, and a member of the Ivy League. Chartered by Rhode Island's colonial legislature in 1764, it is known for its undergraduate Open Curriculum, which has no common required core. Christina H. Paxson, president since July 2012, announced on August 3, 2026, that the 2026–27 academic year would be her last in office. As of October 1, 2026, the search for Brown's 20th president remained underway.Open the full entry.⁠[1]

In 1996 she, M. L. Littman and A. W. Moore published “Reinforcement Learning: A Survey” in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, reviewing from a computer-science perspective the trade-off between exploration and exploitation, foundations in Markov decision theory, learning from delayed reinforcement and hidden state.⁠[2]

In 1997, as an associate professor of computer science at Brown University, she received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award for contributions to the semantic theory of information in embedded systems, programming tools for mobile robots, algorithms for partially observable Markov decision processes, and applying reinforcement learning to intelligent embedded control.⁠[3]

The award profile noted that she was the author of the book Learning in Embedded Systems and a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s National Young Investigator Award.⁠[3]

In 1998 she, Michael Littman and Anthony Cassandra published “Planning and acting in partially observable stochastic domains” in the journal Artificial Intelligence. The journal’s editors-in-chief later said the paper introduced the partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) from operations research to AI and had a significant impact on the robotics community.⁠[4]

In 2000 the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) was founded with her as editor-in-chief, operating as a fully free open-access journal.⁠[5]

JMLR’s history records that, inspired by Steve Minton’s founding of JAIR, she assembled a founding team and the website went live on June 23, 2000; in 2001 most of the editorial board of Machine Learning resigned to join JMLR, and her successor Lawrence Saul began working alongside her in mid-2008 and took over fully in 2009.⁠[6]

In May 2010 she and Tomás Lozano-Pérez issued the MIT CSAIL technical report “Hierarchical Task and Motion Planning in the Now,” outlining an aggressively hierarchical, top-down approach to integrating task and motion planning that limits the length of plans to be constructed.⁠[7]

In April 2011 she gave a talk titled “A Dream of Robots” at the “Computation and the Transformation of Practically Everything” symposium marking MIT’s 150th anniversary, noting that robotics and AI had once worked closely but drifted apart and asking “is it time to try again?”⁠[8]

That May, she, then the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, and Lozano-Pérez presented the hierarchical planning approach at the IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation in Shanghai; she said the robots “do the execution interleaved with the planning.”⁠[9]

On June 11, 2018, MIT announced that she and Josh Tenenbaum would be scientific directors of “The Core” within the Quest for Intelligence.⁠[10]

On March 12, 2019, she appeared on episode 15 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, “Reinforcement Learning, Planning, and Robotics,” introduced as known for work in reinforcement learning, planning and robot navigation, a winner of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and editor-in-chief of JMLR.⁠[11]

In 2020 she gave the invited talk “Doing for Our Robots What Nature Did For Us” at ICLR; the conference bio described her as an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellow, a former member of the AAAI Executive Council and a fellow of the AAAI.⁠[12]

In August 2021 the 1998 POMDP paper by her, Littman and Cassandra received the AIJ Classic Paper Award at IJCAI 2021, which honors papers published in Artificial Intelligence at least 15 years earlier that are exceptional in significance and impact.⁠[13]

On October 2, 2026, she was the first guest of the TU Darmstadt computer science department’s new Distinguished Lecture Series, speaking on “Rational Robots” and arguing for an explicitly rational approach in which humans give robots goals and the robots choose the most effective actions. She is also a fellow of the university-led cluster of excellence “Reasonable Artificial Intelligence” (RAI).⁠[14]

As of October 2026 she is the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, Director of Research of the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI) and a principal investigator at CSAIL, working on intelligent robots with a focus on learning, state estimation and planning under uncertainty.⁠[15]

Personal website: Public link: https://people.csail.mit.edu/lpk/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

MIT: Official website: https://www.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[16]

Journal of Machine Learning Research: Official website: https://jmlr.org/ (opens in a new window)⁠[6]

MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence: Official website: https://sqi.mit.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[15]