Joëlle Pineau (born 1974) is a Canadian computer scientist and associate professor 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 ...

. She is the lead of

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

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 ...

Research lab (FAIR) in

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-most populous city in Canada and List of towns in Quebec, most populous city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian ...

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

Early life and education

Pineau was born in 1974 in

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

Ontario Ontario ( ; ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada.Ontario is located in the geographic eastern half of Canada, but it has historically and politically been considered to be part of Central Canada. Located in Central Ca ...

. She played violin in the

Ottawa Symphony Orchestra The Ottawa Symphony Orchestra (OSO) is a full size orchestra in Ottawa, Canada, including professional, student and amateur musicians. With around 100 musicians, the OSO is Ottawa's largest orchestra, which allows it to perform large symphonic rep ...

. She eventually studied engineering at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario Waterloo is a city in the Canadian province of Ontario. It is one of three cities in the Regional Municipality ...

. She completed her postgraduate education in robotics at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in 2004. A chapter of Pineau's Masters thesis, ''Point-based value iteration: An anytime algorithm for POMDPs'', has been published and cited almost 1,000 times. Her doctoral thesis, ''Tractable Planning Under Uncertainty: Exploiting Structure'', was supervised by

Sebastian Thrun Sebastian Thrun (born May 14, 1967) is a German-American entrepreneur, educator, and computer scientist. He is CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google VP and Fellow, a Professor of Comp ...

and Geoff Gordon.

Research and career

Pineau develops algorithms and models that allow learning in partially complex domains. She is co-director of

's Reasoning and Learning Lab. She founded two start-ups that develop robotic assistants for the elderly; the SmartWheeler initiative and the Nursebot platform. SmartWheeler is a multi-modal wheelchair that combines artificial intelligence and robotics. She is a 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 ...

(AAAI) and a Senior Fellow of 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 ...

. In 2016 she was inducted into the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; french: Société royale du Canada, SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bil ...

College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Pineau investigates approaches to personal medicine, using data from medical charts, X-ray images, clinical notes and lab reports to generate new treatment strategies. She teaches

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 ...

how to analyse medical scans. Her team have used

Deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

for detecting seizures. She serves as an editor of the ''

Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research The ''Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research'' (''JAIR'') is an open access peer-reviewed scientific journal covering research in all areas of artificial intelligence. History It was established in 1993 as one of the first scientific journa ...

'' (JAIR) and the ''

Journal of Machine Learning Research The ''Journal of Machine Learning Research'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering machine learning. It was established in 2000 and the first editor-in-chief was Leslie Kaelbling. The current editors-in-chief are Francis Ba ...

'' (JMLR). She has given lectures for the Artificial Intelligence Channel. In 2017 Pineau was appointed the head of the Facebook AI Research Lab in Montreal. She won a Facebook Research Award. She spoke at the third annual Canada 2020 conference. Here she focuses 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 ...

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

computer vision Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...

and video understanding. In 2018 she won the

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; french: Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada, CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering rese ...

E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship. She challenges

research that is not reproducible. She was the reproducibility chair for the

Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meeti ...

in 2019, where she introduced the requirement of a reproducibility checklist as part of the paper submission process. She is president of the International Machine Learning Society. In 2019, Pineau received a Governor General's Innovation Award for her leadership in the innovative applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the field of

personalized medicine Personalized medicine, also referred to as precision medicine, is a medical model that separates people into different groups—with medical decisions, practices, interventions and/or products being tailored to the individual patient based on the ...

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pineau, Joelle Artificial intelligence researchers 1974 births Canadian women computer scientists Canadian computer scientists Carnegie Mellon University alumni University of Waterloo alumni Academic staff of McGill University Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Facebook employees Living people Date of birth missing (living people) People from Ottawa