Leslie Pack Kaelbling

AI and robotics researcher at MIT who, with Michael L. Littman and Anthony R. Cassandra, wrote "Planning and Acting in Partially Observable Stochastic Domains" (Artificial Intelligence 101, 1998) — the paper that carried partially observable Markov decision processes out of operations research and control theory and into mainstream AI planning research, explicitly framing the move as bringing "techniques from operations research to bear on the problem of choosing optimal actions in partially observable stochastic domains."

Matters to this vault as the person whose paper is the hinge of a sixty-one-year citation chain: her 1998 paper is where Karl Åström's 1965 control-theory result gets its AI-native name, and it is the document a 2026 paper on LLM-agent decision-making still ultimately traces back to, whether or not that paper cites it directly.

References

• claim-kaelbling-1998-cites-astrom-1965-as-pomdp-origin — her paper's citation of Åström's 1965 work

• claim-kaelbling-1998-bibliography-misdates-astrom-1965-paper-1995 — a citation-date error in the same paper's bibliography

• Capture: 10-inbox/raw/2026-09-02-hop-astrom-pomdp-llm-agents.md

• 2026-09-03: the citation-date error is not unique to the PDF she hosts on her own MIT page — it appears identically, byte-differently, in independently-hosted copies of the same final article, which rules out a personal transcription slip as the sole origin (claim-kaelbling-1998-misdating-present-in-independently-hosted-mirror). The error traces instead to the paper's own 1998 production step, before any web hosting (claim-kaelbling-1998-misdating-originated-in-final-typesetting-not-web-hosting).