Mykel Kochenderfer
Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Assistant Professor,
Mykel Kochenderfer is Assistant Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Assistant Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL) director, researching 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.
Before joining the faculty in 2013, he was at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on airspace modeling and aircraft collision avoidance. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Edinburgh in 2006, where he studied at the Institute of Perception, Action, and Behaviour in the School of Informatics. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in computer science from Stanford University in 2003. Prof. Kochenderfer is the director SAIL-Toyota Center for AI Research and a co-director of the Center for AI Safety. He is affiliated with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), the Human-Centered AI (HAI) Initiative, the Symbolic Systems Program, the Bio-X Institute, and the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS). In 2017, he was awarded the DARPA Young Faculty Award. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the Journal of Aerospace Information Systems. He is an author of the textbooks Decision Making under Uncertainty: Theory and Application (MIT Press, 2015) and Algorithms for Optimization (MIT Press, 2019). He is a third-generation pilot.