Automated Decision Making for Safety Critical Applications

Mykel Kochenderfer is an Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University. He is the director of the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL), conducting research on advanced algorithms and analytical methods for the design of robust decision making systems. Of particular interest are systems for air traffic control, unmanned aircraft, and automated driving where decisions must be made in uncertain, dynamic environments while maintaining safety and efficiency. Research at SISL focuses on efficient computational methods for deriving optimal decision strategies from high-dimensional, probabilistic problem representations. Prior to joining the faculty in 2013, he was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory where he worked on aircraft collision avoidance, leading to the creation of the ACAS X international standard for manned and unmanned aircraft. Prof. Kochenderfer is a co-director of the Center for AI Safety. He is Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and associate editor of the Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. He is an author of the textbooks Decision Making under Uncertainty: Theory and Application (MIT Press, 2015), Algorithms for Optimization (MIT Press, 2019), and Algorithms for Decision Making (MIT Press, 2022).