Sheila McIlraith

Sheila McIlraith
Born	Sheila Ann McIlraith
Alma mater	University of Toronto (PhD)
Known for	Semantic web services[4]
Awards	AAAI Fellow (2011) ACM Fellow (2019)[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Artificial Intelligence World Wide Web Computer Science AI Planning[2]
Institutions	University of Toronto Xerox PARC Stanford University
Thesis	Towards a formal account of diagnostic problem solving (1997)
Doctoral advisor	Raymond Reiter[3]
Website	www.cs.toronto.edu/~sheila

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

Education

McIlraith earned her PhD at the University of Toronto[5] under the supervision of Raymond Reiter.[3]

Research and career

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]

Awards and honors

McIlraith was elected an ACM Fellow in 2019 "for contributions to knowledge representation and its applications to automated planning and semantic web services".[1][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]

References

1. 2019 ACM Fellows Recognized for Far-Reaching Accomplishments that Define the Digital Age, Association for Computing Machinery, retrieved 2019-12-11
2. Sheila McIlraith publications indexed by Google Scholar
3. Sheila McIlraith at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
4. McIlraith, S.A.; Son, T.C.; Honglei Zeng (2001), "Semantic Web services", IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16 (2): 46–53, doi:10.1109/5254.920599, ISSN 1541-1672
5. McIlraith, Sheila Ann (1997). Towards a formal account of diagnostic problem solving. utoronto.ca (PhD thesis). University of Toronto Library. hdl:1807/10895. OCLC 46561408.
6. "Sheila McIlraith's (old) Home Page", ksl.stanford.edu, Stanford University
7. McIlraith, Sheila (2019), "McIlraith brief biography", cs.toronto.edu, retrieved 2019-12-11
8. Martin, David; Paolucci, Massimo; McIlraith, Sheila; Burstein, Mark; McDermott, Drew; McGuinness, Deborah; Parsia, Bijan; Payne, Terry; Sabou, Marta (2005), Cardoso, Jorge; Sheth, Amit (eds.), "Bringing Semantics to Web Services: The OWL-S Approach" (PDF), Semantic Web Services and Web Process Composition, vol. 3387, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 26–42, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-30581-1_4, ISBN 978-3-540-24328-1
9. "AAAI-18", aaai.org, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
10. "KR 2012", wikicfp.com, Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning
11. McIlraith, Sheila A; Plexousakis, Dimitris; Van Harmelen, Frank, eds. (2004), "ISWC 2004", link.springer.com, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, International Semantic Web Conference, doi:10.1007/b102467, ISBN 978-3-540-23798-3, S2CID 8046354
12. "Sheila McIlraith", awards.acm.org, Association for Computing Machinery
13. "Elected AAAI Fellows", aaai.org, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
14. "SWSA Ten-Year Award", swsa.semanticweb.org, Semantic Web Science Association
15. "ICAPS Awards", icaps-conference.org, International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling