Spotlight Seminars: Prof. Leslie Pack Kaelbling- MIT - May, 29 2026 – 3:00 PM (CEST)
Gabriella Cortellessa
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[* Apologies in case of multiple posting *]
The Italian Association for Artificial Intelligence in collaboration with FBK academy, is pleased to announce the next seminar of its Spotlight Seminars on AI initiative:
Date and Time: May, 29 2026 – 3:00 PM (CEST)
Online attendance: The seminars will be held virtually on the YouTube channel of the Association (https://www.youtube.com/c/AIxIAit) and https://www.youtube.com/live/WmnF-NhKgzY
In presence attendance: Fondazione Bruno Kessler - Sala Luigi Stringa, Via Sommarive 18, 38123, Povo Trento, IT. (register at https://www.youtube.com/live/WmnF-NhKgzY
Title: The Role of Rationality in Modern Robotics
Speaker: Prof. Leslie Pack Kaelbling- MIT
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.
I will revisit the rational-agent approach to the design of intelligent robots, from the perspectives of engineering effort, computational efficiency, cognitive modeling and understandability. I 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 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.
AIXIA spotlight seminars: The seminar series aims to illustrate, explore and discuss current scientific challenges, trends, and possibilities in all branches of our articulated research field. The seminars will be held virtually on the YouTube channel of the Association (https://www.youtube.com/c/AIxIAit), every month (and made permanently available on that channel), by leading Italian researchers as well as by top international scientists.
The seminars are mainly aimed at a broad audience interested in AI research, and they are also included in the Italian PhD programme in Artificial Intelligence; indeed, AIxIA warmly encourages the attendance of young scientists and PhD students.
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The Spotlight Seminars on AI Committee,
Giuseppe De Giacomo
Luciano Serafini