Sheila McIlraith

Faculty Member

Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto

Canada CIFAR Artificial Intelligence Chair

Associate Director and Research Lead at Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society

Sheila McIlraith is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (Vector Institute), and an Associate Director and Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. Prior to joining the University of Toronto, Prof. McIlraith spent six years as a Research Scientist at Stanford University, and one year at Xerox PARC. McIlraith’s research is in the area of sequential decision making, broadly construed, with a focus on human-compatible AI. She also has a particular interest in the ethics of AI and the impact of AI on society. McIlraith is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Associate Editor for the Journal of AI Research (JAIR), and a past Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence. McIlraith is past Program Co-Chair of the 32nd AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the 13th International Conference on Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR2012), and the International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2004), as well as past Conference Co-Chair of the 34th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS). McIlraith and co-authors have received a number of paper awards from premier international venues including multiple tests-of-time awards, recognizing influential and impactful work.

Research Interests

  • Knowledge Representation & Automated Reasoning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Human-Compatible AI and AI Safety
  • Sequential Decision Making

Highlights

  • Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
  • Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI).
  • Associate Editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).

Publications

Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress

Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton and Andrew Yao and Dawn Song and Pieter Abbeel and Trevor Darrell and Yuval Noah Harari and Ya-Qin Zhang and Lan Xue and Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Gillian Hadfield and Jeff Clune and Tegan Maharaj and Frank Hutter and Atılım Gunes Baydin and Sheila McIlraith and Qiqi Gao and Ashwin Acharya and David Krueger and Anca Dragan and Philip Torr and Stuart Russell and Daniel Kahneman and Jan Brauner and Soren Mindermann

2024