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.
[8] She then worked at SRI International and the affiliated robotics spin-off Teleos Research before joining the faculty at Brown University.
[7] 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.