By playing, you agree to uListen's Terms and Privacy Policy and YouTube's Terms of Service.

Leslie Kaelbling: Reinforcement Learning, Planning, and Robotics | Lex Fridman Podcast #15

Leslie Kaelbling is a roboticist and professor at MIT. She is recognized for her work in reinforcement learning, planning, robot navigation, and several other topics in AI.

Lex FridmanhostLeslie Kaelblingguest

Mar 12, 20191h 1mWatch on YouTube ↗

Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.

EPISODE INFO

Released: March 12, 2019
Duration: 1h 1m
Channel: Lex Fridman Podcast
Watch on YouTube: ▶ Open ↗

EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Leslie Kaelbling is a roboticist and professor at MIT. She is recognized for her work in reinforcement learning, planning, robot navigation, and several other topics in AI. She won the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award and was the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Journal of Machine Learning Research. Thank you for listening ❤ Check out our sponsors: https://lexfridman.com/sponsors/ep15-sb See below for timestamps, and to give feedback, submit questions, contact Lex, etc. *CONTACT LEX:* *Feedback* - give feedback to Lex: https://lexfridman.com/survey *AMA* - submit questions, videos or call-in: https://lexfridman.com/ama *Hiring* - join our team: https://lexfridman.com/hiring *Other* - other ways to get in touch: https://lexfridman.com/contact *PODCAST LINKS:*
Podcast Website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/
Podcast Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/lexclips
*SOCIAL LINKS:*
X: https://x.com/lexfridman
Instagram: https://instagram.com/lexfridman
TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@lexfridman
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/lexfridman
Facebook: https://facebook.com/lexfridman
Patreon: https://patreon.com/lexfridman
Telegram: https://t.me/lexfridman
Reddit: https://reddit.com/r/lexfridman

SPEAKERS

Lex Fridman
host
Leslie Kaelbling
guest
Narrator
other

EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Lex Fridman Podcast, featuring Lex Fridman and Leslie Kaelbling, Leslie Kaelbling: Reinforcement Learning, Planning, and Robotics | Lex Fridman Podcast #15 explores Leslie Kaelbling on uncertainty, abstraction, and truly intelligent robots Leslie Kaelbling discusses her path from philosophy to AI and robotics, arguing that logic, formal semantics, and materialism naturally underpin her view that human-level robot behavior is a purely technical challenge. She traces the cyclical history of AI, contrasting expert systems, symbolic reasoning, and modern learning-based approaches, emphasizing the central role of abstraction, uncertainty, and hierarchical planning. A major theme is planning and acting under partial observability via POMDPs and belief-space planning, and how robots must reason about both the world and their own uncertainty. She also critiques current research culture and publishing, champions open access and deeper theory, and stresses the need to design good objectives and structural biases rather than rely on monolithic end-to-end learning.

RELATED EPISODES