New: CS Distinguished Lecture Series

The new CS Distinguished Lecture Series brings leading scientists to the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt.

They offer a unique opportunity to learn directly from people shaping the field, discuss challenging questions, and build connections that reach across disciplines and continents.

Each lecture is followed by a get-together, so there's time to continue the conversation in person.

Free admission. Registration required.

CS Distinguished Lecture #1

Speaker: Prof. Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Title: Rational Robots

Abstract

There has been exciting recent progress at the frontiers of embodied intelligence, with significant improvements in perception and learning for robotic systems. As we move from narrow applications to more general-purpose robots, the question arises of how they should be designed. I will argue in favor of an explicitly "rational" approach to intelligent robot design, in which robots have explicit beliefs about the state of the 3D world around them and explicit goals given to them via human instruction, and perform explicit reasoning about the most effective behavior given those beliefs and goals. I will illustrate this approach through several recent research projects.

Bio:

Leslie is a Professor at MIT. She has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford, and was previously on the faculty at Brown University. She was the founding editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research. Her research agenda is to make intelligent robots using methods including learning, planning, and reasoning about uncertainty. She was doing agentic AI way before it was cool.