Award-Winning Researcher Trains Robots to Make Educated Guesses

Yen-Ling Kuo always wanted to understand how things worked. When she was growing up in Taiwan, reading the story of Michael Faraday in elementary school piqued her curiosity about the natural world. During that time, she was introduced to Logo, a computer program with a turtle cursor to help children learn basic coding through hands-on experimentation.It was Kuo’s introduction to programming logic.Yen-Ling KuoEmployerUniversity of Virginia in CharlottesvilleTitleAssistant professor of computer science Member gradeMemberAlma matersNational Taiwan University; MITIn high school she learned the capacity computers held. She could write programs that completed tasks independently, she realized.“Once I discovered how powerful computers could be,” she says, “I knew I wanted to focus on using them to solve real-world problems.”Kuo, an IEEE member, never lost her interest in the “how” behind processes and tools. Her curiosity, combined with a stint working at a Silicon Valley comp