2020 Alumni Achievement Award
After growing up in Lisbon, Portugal, where she studied Electrical Engineering, Manuela Veloso came to CMU in 1986 eager to learn artificial intelligence from the founders and leaders of the field at CMU. She truly enjoyed her graduate student times, and she finished her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1992 with a thesis in AI on Planning by Analogy, advised by the great late Jaime Carbonell. Manuela joined the faculty in the Computer Science Department, where she enthusiastically has carried visionary research in AI for close to three decades.
She founded the CORAL laboratory to research AI agents that collaborate, observe, reason, act and learn. The lab became the home to many generations of AI students, in particular contributing the CoBot autonomous mobile service robots, who have autonomously navigated our buildings for more than 1,000kms since 2009, and teams of soccer robots, who have been participants and often champions of RoboCup since 1997. Her technical contributions are captured in hundreds of publications with her students and multiple recognitions. Manuela has taught and mentored her students to carry ambitious AI research to aim high at advancing science, engineering and social impact. She is proud to have graduated 43 Ph.D. students, who are now leaders in academia and top technology companies. Manuela is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science, and past Head of the Machine Learning Department.
She is a Fellow of all four major associations in her research areas – AAAS, AAAI, ACM, and IEEE. In July 2018, she accepted an intriguing and challenging opportunity to create J. P. Morgan Chase AI Research. She joined as Managing Director and has since grown a team of nearly 40 Master and Ph.D. level AI researchers. The team pursues aspirational goals to bring AI to complex multiagent economic systems, eradication of financial crime, safe effective data sharing, and responsible optimal interactions with stakeholders. She leads the team building upon her formidable CMU experience. Manuela always carries and presents her research with great passion, inspiring many – including under-resourced groups – to follow their dreams in technology. Manuela has a large, wonderful supportive family with her husband of many years, her children and grandchildren, her parents, siblings, nephews, aunts and uncle. The best times of the year are her family gatherings, most especially in Portugal.