Joëlle Pineau facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Joëlle Pineau
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Joëlle Pineau speaks at the Canada Science and Technology Museum in 2018
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| Born | 1974 (age 50–51) |
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| Children | 4 |
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| Thesis | Tractable Planning Under Uncertainty: Exploiting Structure (2004) |
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Joëlle Pineau, born in 1974, is a Canadian computer scientist. She is an Associate Professor at McGill University. Until May 2025, she was a global vice president at AI at Meta, which was formerly known as Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR). She lives in Montreal, Quebec. In 2023, she became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.
Early Life and Education
Joëlle Pineau was born in 1974 in Ottawa, Ontario. When she was younger, she played the viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra. She later went on to study engineering at the University of Waterloo.
While studying, she helped create a voice recognition system for helicopter pilots. This system allowed pilots to control things with their voice. Since no female pilots were available, Pineau herself sat in the cockpit. She recorded her voice while pretending to be under stress, just like a pilot would be.
Her first job was at Natural Resources Canada. There, she worked on models for using solar energy in fish farming. She then continued her studies in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, finishing in 2004. Her doctoral thesis was about planning in uncertain situations.
Research and Career
Joëlle Pineau creates computer programs and systems that can learn in complex situations. She is a co-director at McGill University's Reasoning and Learning Lab. She also started two companies that make robotic helpers for older people. These include the SmartWheeler and Nursebot projects. SmartWheeler is a special wheelchair that uses both artificial intelligence and robotics.
Pineau is a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). She is also a Senior Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. In 2016, she joined the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.
AI in Medicine
Pineau explores how to use artificial intelligence (AI) for personalized medicine. This means using a person's unique medical information to find the best treatments for them. Her team uses data like medical charts, X-ray images, and lab reports. She teaches AI systems how to analyze medical scans. Her team has also used a method called Deep learning to help detect seizures.
She helps edit important journals like the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR). She is also a key member of Mila Quebec, a famous AI research center.
Leadership in AI
In 2017, Joëlle Pineau became the head of the Facebook AI Research Lab in Montreal. She won a Facebook Research Award for her work. At Meta, she focused on areas like reinforcement learning and computer vision. These fields teach computers to learn from experience and understand images.
In 2018, she received the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship. Pineau believes that AI research should be easy to check and repeat. In 2019, she was the reproducibility chair for a big AI conference. She made it a rule for researchers to include a checklist to show their work could be repeated. She is also the president of the International Machine Learning Society.
In 2019, Pineau received a Governor General's Innovation Award. This award recognized her leadership in using AI and machine learning for personalized medicine. She rose through the ranks at Meta's AI research group, eventually leading the entire organization.
In 2023, Joëlle Pineau was elected to the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. This was for her important work in machine learning. Her work focused on how computers can learn and plan even when things are uncertain. She left Meta's AI research group in May 2025. She stated that she wanted to focus her energy on new opportunities.
Personal Life
Joëlle Pineau has four children.
