Manuela Maria Veloso (born August 12, 1957) is an international expert in artificial intelligence and robotics, serving as the Head of J.P. Morgan AI Research and Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emeritus in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she previously headed the Machine Learning Department.^[10,7,8,1] Her academic background includes an MSc from Instituto Superior Técnico - University of Lisbon, an MA from Boston University, and a PhD in 1992 from Carnegie Mellon University with a thesis titled "Learning by Analogical Reasoning in General Purpose Problem Solving" advised by Jaime Carbonell.^[5] Her research focuses on artificial intelligence, robotics, planning, learning, and multi-agent systems, and her notable doctoral students include Astro Teller and Peter Stone. Veloso served as president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) until 2014, and is a co-founder and Past President of the RoboCup Federation. She is a fellow of the AAAI (2003), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, 2016), and received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1995.^[4]

Manuela Veloso received her Licenciatura and Master of Science degree in electrical engineering from Lisbon's Instituto Superior Técnico in 1980 and 1984 respectively. She then attended Boston University, and received a Master of Arts in computer science in 1986. She moved to Carnegie Mellon University and received her Ph.D. in computer science there in 1992. Her thesis Learning by Analogical Reasoning in General Purpose Problem Solving was supervised by Jaime Carbonell.^[1]

Shortly after receiving her Ph.D., Manuela Veloso joined the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science as an assistant professor. She was promoted to the rank of associate professor in 1997, and full professor in 2002. She was appointed as the head of Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department in 2016. Veloso was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the academic year 1999–2000, a Radcliffe Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University for the academic year 2006–2007, and a visiting professor at Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) at New York University (NYU) for the academic year 2013–2014. As of 2015, Veloso has graduated 32 PhD students.^[1]

She is the winner of the 2009 ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award. She was the Program Chair for IJCAI-07, held January 6–12, 2007, in Hyderabad, India and was program co-chair of AAAI-05, held July 9–13, 2005, in Pittsburgh. She was a member of the editorial board of CACM and the AAAI Magazine. She is the author of one book on Planning by Analogical Reasoning.

Veloso describes her research goals as the "effective construction of autonomous agents where cognition, perception, and action are combined to address planning, execution, and learning tasks".^[12] Veloso and her students have researched and developed a variety of autonomous robots, including teams of soccer robots, and mobile service robots. Her robot soccer teams have been RoboCup world champions several times, and the CoBot mobile robots have autonomously navigated for more than 1,000 km in university buildings.^[11] In a November 2016 interview, Veloso discussed the ethical responsibility inherent in developing autonomous systems, and expressed her optimism that the technology would be put to use for the good of humankind.^[14]

Veloso is featured in the Notable Women in Computing cards.^[15] She received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 1995 and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research in 1997. She was elected an AAAI Fellow in 2003, was a Radcliffe Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2006/2007, and received the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award in 2009. In 2010, she was named a Fellow of both the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Veloso served as an Einstein Chair Professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2012. In 2016, she was named an ACM Fellow for "contributions to the field of artificial intelligence, in particular in planning, learning, multi-agent systems, and robotics."