| Leslie P. Kaelbling | |
| Nationality: | American |
| Fields: | Robotics Computer Science |
| Work Institutions: | SRI International Brown University Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Alma Mater: | Stanford University |
| Doctoral Advisor: | Nils J. Nilsson |
| Doctoral Students: | Michael L. Littman Leonid Peshkin Kristian Kersting |
| Thesis Title: | Learning in Embedded Systems |
| Thesis Year: | 1990 |
| Thesis Url: | http://search.proquest.com/docview/303871770/ |
| Known For: | Partially observable Markov decision process Founder and first editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research |
| Awards: | IJCAI Computers and Thought Award (1997) AAAI Fellow (2000) |
Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American roboticist and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] She is widely recognized for adapting partially observable Markov decision processes from operations research for application in artificial intelligence and robotics.[2] [3] [4] Kaelbling received the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award in 1997 for applying reinforcement learning to embedded control systems and developing programming tools for robot navigation.[5] In 2000, she was elected as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.[6]
Kaelbling received an A. B. in Philosophy in 1983 and a Ph. D. in Computer Science in 1990, both from Stanford University.[7] During this time she was also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Language and Information.[8] She then worked at SRI International and the affiliated robotics spin-off Teleos Research before joining the faculty at Brown University. She left Brown in 1999 to join the faculty at MIT.[9] Her research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty, machine learning, and sensing with applications to robotics.
In the spring of 2000, she and two-thirds of the editorial board of the Kluwer-owned journal Machine Learning resigned in protest to its pay-to-access archives with simultaneously limited financial compensation for authors.[10] Kaelbling co-founded and served as the first editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research, a peer-reviewed open access journal on the same topics which allows researchers to publish articles for free and retain copyright with its archives freely available online.[11] In response to the mass resignation, Kluwer changed their publishing policy to allow authors to self-archive their papers online after peer-review. Kaelbling responded that this policy was reasonable and would have made the creation of an alternative journal unnecessary, but the editorial board members had made it clear they wanted such a policy and it was only after the threat of resignations and the actual founding of JMLR that the publishing policy finally changed.[12]