Doina Precup is a

Romanian Romanian may refer to: *anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania **Romanians, an ethnic group **Romanian language, a Romance language ***Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language **Romanian cuisine, traditional ...

researcher currently living in Montreal, Canada. She specializes in

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...

(AI). Precup is associate dean of research at the faculty of science at

McGill University McGill University (french: link=no, Université McGill) is an English-language public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter granted by King George IV,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill Universit ...

Canada research chair Canada Research Chair (CRC) is a title given to certain Canadian university research professors by the Canada Research Chairs Program. Program goals The Canada Research Chair program was established in 2000 as a part of the Government of Canada ...

in machine learning and a senior fellow at the

Canadian Institute for Advanced Research The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) is a Canadian-based global research organization that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world to address important and complex questions. It was founded in 1982 and is s ...

. She also heads the Montreal office of

Deepmind DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and research laboratory founded in 2010. DeepMind was List of mergers and acquisitions by Google, acquired by Google in 2014 and became a wholly owned subsid ...

Education

Precup said she was drawn to the field of artificial intelligence at a young age by her interest in science fiction, where robots are often portrayed as useful and benevolent. Her mother was a university professor of computer science in Romania. She obtained a bachelor of science degree in computer science and engineering (magna cum laude) at

Technical University of Cluj-Napoca The Technical University of Cluj-Napoca (UTCN short for ro, Universitatea Tehnică din Cluj-Napoca) is a public university located in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. It was founded in 1948, based on the older ''Industrial College'' (1920). The Technical U ...

in 1994, followed by a master of science in 1995. She left Romania in 1995 on a

Fulbright scholarship The Fulbright Program, including the Fulbright–Hays Program, is one of several United States Cultural Exchange Programs with the goal of improving intercultural relations, cultural diplomacy, and intercultural competence between the people of ...

to pursue graduate studies at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

, where she earned a master's degree in 1997 and a PhD in 2000. Several women in Precup's family have had successful careers in science and the science program in her high school in Romania was well attended by girls. She only became aware of the

gender imbalance In anthropology and demography, the human sex ratio is the ratio of male, males to female, females in a population. Like most sexual species, the sex ratio in humans is close to 1:1. In humans, the natural ratio at birth between males and fema ...

in sciences and technology when she moved to North America. She decided to get involved in correcting this situation and does so as the co-founder and advisor of the AI4Good Lab, an organization that aims at getting more women to study and work in artificial intelligence.

Career in artificial intelligence

Precup was recruited as an assistant professor by McGill University's School of Computer Science in 2000 and has since been living in the Montreal area. In 2017, Precup was appointed to lead the Montreal office of the artificial intelligence firm Deepmind, which is owned by Google. She teaches at McGill while conducting fundamental research on

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...

at Deepmind, working in particular on AI applications in areas that have a social impact, such as health care (medical imaging for example). She's interested in machine decision-making in situations where uncertainty is high. She is a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, fellow of the

Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) is an international scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public understanding of artif ...

and a member of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. With four other AI researchers (

Yoshua Bengio Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de ...

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 6 December 1947) is a British-Canadian cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, most noted for his work on ar ...

, Rich Sutton and Ian Kerr), she sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister in 2017 asking him to start addressing the risks posed by the development of AI-controlled weapons.

References

External links

AI4good
{{DEFAULTSORT:Precup, Doina Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Technical University of Cluj-Napoca alumni Canadian computer scientists Canadian women computer scientists Romanian emigrants to Canada Academic staff of McGill University University of Massachusetts Amherst alumni Artificial intelligence researchers Place of birth missing (living people)