Joëlle Pineau (born 1974) is a Canadian computer scientist and Associate Professor at

McGill University McGill University (French: Université McGill) is an English-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, ...

. She was the global vice president of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), now known as AI at Meta, until May 2025, and is based in

Montreal Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

Quebec Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...

. She was elected to the

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Canada judges to have "made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life" ...

in 2023.

Early life and education

Pineau was born in 1974 in

Ottawa Ottawa is the capital city of Canada. It is located in the southern Ontario, southern portion of the province of Ontario, at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the cor ...

Ontario Ontario is the southernmost Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Canada. Located in Central Canada, Ontario is the Population of Canada by province and territory, country's most populous province. As of the 2021 Canadian census, it ...

. She played the viola 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 repe ...

. She eventually studied engineering at the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a Public university, public research university located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to uptown Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also op ...

. During that time, she helped train a voice recognition system for helicopter pilots; when no female pilots were available, Pineau sat in the cockpit to record voices for the system, simulating typical pilot stress levels. Her first job was at Canada's Ministry of Natural Resources, where she developed models focused on solar energy applications in aquaculture. She then completed her postgraduate education in robotics at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

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 chief executive officer of Kitty Hawk Corporation, and chairman and co-founder of Udacity. Before that, he was a Google vice preside ...

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 Learned society, scientific society devoted to promote research in, and responsible use of, artificial intelligence. AAAI also aims to increase public under ...

(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 su ...

. In 2016 she was inducted into the

Royal Society of Canada The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , 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, bilingual council of distinguishe ...

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 the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

how to analyse medical scans. Her team have used

Deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

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 Bac ...

'' (JMLR). She has given lectures for the Artificial Intelligence Channel. She is a core academic member of Mila Quebec. 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 interdisciplinary area of machine learning and optimal control concerned with how an intelligent agent should take actions in a dynamic environment in order to maximize a reward signal. Reinforcement learnin ...

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

computer vision Computer vision tasks include methods for image sensor, acquiring, Image processing, processing, Image analysis, analyzing, and understanding digital images, and extraction of high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical ...

and video understanding. In 2018 she won the

Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC; , CRSNG) is the major federal agency responsible for funding natural sciences and engineering research in Canada. NSERC directly funds university professors and students as ...

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. Along with ICLR and ICML, it is one of the thre ...

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. She has climbed the ranks within FAIR and is now leading the entire AI research organization at Meta. Pineau was elected to the

in 2023 for her "contributions to research in machine learning, with a focus on Bayesian learning and planning under uncertainty." Pineau left Meta's FAIR group in May 2025, stating that she wanted to refocus her energy before pursuing a new opportunity.

Personal life

Pineau has four children.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pineau, Joelle Canadian 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 Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada Facebook employees Living people Date of birth missing (living people) Scientists from Ottawa Academics from Ottawa