Joëlle Pineau

Joëlle Pineau (born 1974) is a Canadian computer scientist and Associate Professor at McGill University. She is the global Vice President of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), now known as Meta AI, and is based in Montreal, Quebec. She was elected to the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023.

Early life and education
Pineau was born in 1974 in Ottawa, Ontario. She played the viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra. She eventually studied engineering at the University of Waterloo. She completed her postgraduate education in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004. A chapter of Pineau's Masters thesis, Point-based value iteration: An anytime algorithm for POMDPs, has been published and cited almost 1,000 times. Her doctoral thesis, Tractable Planning Under Uncertainty: Exploiting Structure, was supervised by Sebastian Thrun and Geoff Gordon.

Research and career
Pineau develops algorithms and models that allow learning in partially complex domains. She is co-director of McGill University's Reasoning and Learning Lab. She founded two start-ups that develop robotic assistants for the elderly; the SmartWheeler initiative and the Nursebot platform. SmartWheeler is a multi-modal wheelchair that combines artificial intelligence and robotics.

She is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2016 she was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. Pineau investigates approaches to personal medicine, using data from medical charts, X-ray images, clinical notes and lab reports to generate new treatment strategies. She teaches Artificial intelligence how to analyse medical scans. Her team have used Deep learning for detecting seizures. She serves as an editor of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR) and the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR). She has given lectures for the Artificial Intelligence Channel. She is a core academic member of Mila Quebec.

In 2017 Pineau was appointed the head of the Facebook AI Research Lab in Montreal. She won a Facebook Research Award. She spoke at the third annual Canada 2020 conference. Here she focuses on reinforcement learning, deep learning, computer vision and video understanding. In 2018 she won the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship. She challenges Artificial intelligence research that is not reproducible. She was the reproducibility chair for the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in 2019, where she introduced the requirement of a reproducibility checklist as part of the paper submission process. She is president of the International Machine Learning Society. In 2019, Pineau received a Governor General's Innovation Award for her leadership in the innovative applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the field of personalized medicine. She has climbed the ranks within FAIR and is now leading the entire AI research organization at Meta.

Pineau was elected to the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023 for her "contributions to research in machine learning, with a focus on Bayesian learning and planning under uncertainty."