Distinguished Lecture Series: The Role of Rationality in Modern Robotics

Thursday, November 19, 2026, 11 a.m.

Location to be announced

This lecture is open to the public. Please register using the link below.

Abstract:

The classical approach to AI designed systems that were rational at run-time: they had explicit representations of beliefs, goals, and plans and ran inference algorithms, online, to select actions. The rational approach was criticized (by the behaviorists) and modified (by the probabilists) but persisted in some form. More recently, relatively unstructured data-driven end-to-end approaches have demonstrated great success in a wide variety of domains, and began to seem like a plausible route to general-purpose intelligent robots. However, most recently, we have begun to see the limits of pure behavior learning and many practitioners are re-integrating forms of search and explicit reasoning into their approaches. 

Professor Kaelbling will revisit the rational-agent approach to the design of intelligent robots, from the perspectives of engineering effort, computational efficiency, cognitive modeling and understandability. They will present some current research focused on understanding the roles of learning in runtime-rational agents with the ultimate aim of constructing general-purpose human-level intelligent robots. 

Bio:

Leslie Pack Kaelbling 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.