Sheila McIlraith

McIlraith worked as a postdoctoral researcher at Xerox PARC and as a research scientist at Stanford University^[6] before returning to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 2004.^[7]

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 such as DAML-S/OWL-S^[8] and computer-aided diagnosis systems.^[7]

McIlraith served as program co-chair for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Conference in 2018^[9], as program co-chair of the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2012)^[10], and as program co-chair of the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2004.^[11]

McIlraith was elected an ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to knowledge representation and its applications to automated planning and semantic web services".^[2][12] She was also elected an AAAI Fellow in 2011 “for significant contributions to knowledge representation, reasoning about action, and the formal foundations of the semantic web and diagnostic problem solving”.^[13] She and co-authors have been recognized with two 10 year test of time awards from the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) in 2011^[14], and from the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS) in 2022.^[15]