Sheila McIlraith
Appointment
Canada CIFAR AI Chair
Pan-Canadian AI Strategy
About
Appointed Canada CIFAR AI Chair – 2019
Sheila McIlraith is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, a professor in the department of computer science at the University of Toronto and an Associate Director and Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.
McIlraith’s research is in the area of sequential decision making with a focus on human-compatible AI. More recently her work has also focused on AI safety and alignment. Her work on semantic web services has had a notable impact.
Awards
- Lifetime Achievement Award, Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association, 2024
- Northrop Frye Award, University of Toronto, 2023
- Best Paper Prize, IJCAI-JAIR, 2023
- Influential Paper Award, International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2022
- Best Paper Award, 4th Knowledge Representation and Reasoning Meets Machine Learning Workshop, NeurIPS, 2020
- Fellow, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2019
- Best Demo Award, International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling, 2018
- SWSA Ten Year Award, 2011
- Fellow, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2011
- Distinguished Paper Award, In Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Automated Software Engineering, 2007
Relevant Publications
- Bengio, Y. et al. (2024). Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress. Science.
- Horvitz, E., Conitzer, V., McIlraith, S., and Stone, P. (2024). Now, Later, and Lasting: 10 Priorities for AI Research, Policy, and Practice. CACM.
- Lifshitz, S., Paster, K., Chan, H., Ba, J. & McIlraith, S. STEVE-1: A Generative Model for Text-to-Behavior in Minecraft. (2023). NeurIPS.
- Toro Icarte, R. Klassen,T., Valenzano,R., McIlraith, S. (2022). Reward Machines: Exploiting Reward Function Structure in Reinforcement Learning. JAIR 73: 173-208.
McIlraith, S. A., Son, T. C., & Zeng, H. (2001). Semantic web services. IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(2), 46-53.