Sheila McIlraith is a distinguished Canadian computer scientist renowned for her pioneering contributions to artificial intelligence research and development. She currently serves as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where she holds the prestigious designation of Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. Additionally, she serves as Associate Director and Research Lead of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society, guiding critical research on technology's societal implications. McIlraith earned her PhD from the University of Toronto in 1997 under the supervision of Raymond Reiter before establishing her research career at Xerox PARC and Stanford University, where she spent seven years in research positions before returning to the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 2004.
McIlraith's seminal research in knowledge representation and reasoning has fundamentally shaped the landscape of artificial intelligence, particularly her groundbreaking work on semantic web services which catalyzed an entirely new research domain. Her contributions to DAML-S and OWL-S were instrumental in developing the standards that underpin modern web services, influencing practical implementation of emerging web technologies worldwide. With over 150 scholarly publications cited more than 21,000 times, her research spans theoretical foundations to practical applications including computer-aided diagnosis systems and advanced planning frameworks. Her current research focuses on sequential decision-making through the lens of human-compatible AI, exploring how artificial intelligence systems can make decisions that align with human values and cognitive capabilities while advancing AI safety and alignment research.
As a Fellow of both the Association for Computing Machinery (2019) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (2011), McIlraith's influence extends beyond her specific research contributions to shaping the entire field of AI. She has served in leadership roles for numerous prestigious conferences including program co-chair of the AAAI 2018 Conference, KR 2012, and ISWC 2004, and was recently conference co-chair of ICAPS 2024. Currently, she serves as Standing Committee Chair of the Stanford One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100), guiding long-term research on AI's societal impact, and as a member of the Canadian AI Safety Institutes Research Council. Her commitment to integrating ethics into technical education led her to initiate and co-lead the award-winning University of Toronto Embedded Ethics Education Initiative, equipping students with knowledge to incorporate ethical considerations into technology design and implementation.
