Manuela M. Veloso is the Herbert A. Simon University Professor in the School of Computer Science, and the Head of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University.

She received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, and an M.Sc. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, and a MA in Computer Science from Boston University. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.

Manuela Veloso researches in the area of artificial intelligence, with focus on robotics and machine learning. She has contributed algorithms for planning, control learning, and execution for single and multi-robot teams. She has introduced planning by analogical reasoning to improve planning efficiency, as a method to plan by replaying the derivations of similar past planning episodes.

Manuela Veloso and her students have 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 1,000km in university buildings. Professor Veloso is a Fellow of ACM, IEEE, AAAS, and AAAI. She is the Past President of AAAI, and the co-founder, Trustee, and Past President of RoboCup. Manuela Veloso is also the current Head of AI Research at J.P. Morgen.

She is the recipient of multiple awards, including several best paper awards, the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award, the Einstein Chair of the Chinese Academy of Science, an NSF Career Award, and the Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research.

Professor Veloso has graduated 34 PhD students and co-authored more than 300 journal and conference publications.

She is a member of the Portuguese Diaspora Council since 2014.