Sheila McIlraith is a Canadian computer scientist specializing 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). She is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada CIFAR AI Chair (Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence), and Associate Director and Research Lead of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Education and career

McIlraith earned her

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

at the University of Toronto under the supervision of

Raymond Reiter Raymond Reiter (; June 12, 1939 – September 16, 2002) was a Canadian computer scientist and logician. He was one of the founders of the field of non-monotonic reasoning with his work on default logic, model-based diagnosis, closed world r ...

Research and career

McIlraith worked as a

postdoctoral researcher A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). The ultimate goal of a postdoctoral research position is to p ...

Xerox PARC PARC (Palo Alto Research Center; formerly Xerox PARC) is a research and development company in Palo Alto, California. Founded in 1969 by Jacob E. "Jack" Goldman, chief scientist of Xerox Corporation, the company was originally a division of Xero ...

and as a research scientist at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

before returning to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 2004. McIlraith’s research is in the area of AI knowledge representation and reasoning, automated planning, and machine learning where she currently studies sequential decision-making, broadly construed, with a focus on human-compatible AI. Her research was seminal to the area of semantic web services and had made practical contributions to the development of emerging

web standards Web standards are the formal, non-proprietary standards and other technical specifications that define and describe aspects of the World Wide Web. In recent years, the term has been more frequently associated with the trend of endorsing a set of s ...

such as DAML-S/

OWL-S OWL-S is an ontology built on top of Web Ontology Language (OWL) by the DARPA DAML program. It replaces the former DAML-S ontology. "OWL-S is an ontology, within the OWL-based framework of the Semantic Web, for describing Semantic Web Services ...

and

computer-aided diagnosis Computer-aided detection (CADe), also called computer-aided diagnosis (CADx), are systems that assist doctors in the interpretation of medical imaging, medical images. Imaging techniques in X-ray, MRI, Endoscopy, and ultrasound diagnostics yield ...

systems. McIlraith served as program co-chair for 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) Conference in 2018, as program co-chair of the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2012), and as program co-chair of the

International Semantic Web Conference The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) is a series of academic conferences and the premier international forum for the Semantic Web, Linked Data and Knowledge Graph Community. Here, scientists, industry specialists, and practitioners ...

(ISWC) in 2004.

Awards and honors

McIlraith was elected an

ACM Fellow ACM or A.C.M. may refer to: Aviation * AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile * Air chief marshal * Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting * Air cycle machine * Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia Computing ...

in 2019 "for contributions to knowledge representation and its applications to

automated planning Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...

and

semantic web services A semantic web service, like conventional web services, is the server end of a client–server system for machine-to-machine interaction via the World Wide Web. Semantic services are a component of the semantic web because they use markup which m ...

". She was also elected an

AAAI Fellow Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...

in 2011 “for significant contributions to

knowledge representation Knowledge representation and reasoning (KRR, KR&R, KR²) is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to representing information about the world in a form that a computer system can use to solve complex tasks such as diagnosing a medic ...

, reasoning about action, and the formal foundations of the semantic web and diagnostic problem solving”. She and co-authors have been recognized with two 10 year test of time awards from the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2011, and from the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) in 2022.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McIlraith, Sheila Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Canadian women computer scientists Canadian computer scientists University of Toronto alumni Scientists at PARC (company) Academic staff of the University of Toronto Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery