Joelle Pineau

Joelle Pineau, VP of AI Research at Meta and Professor at McGill University's School of Computer Science.

In 2019, the Governor General of Canada honored Pineau with the Innovation Award for her contributions to AI research. The Royal Society of Canada also elected her, recognizing her as one of Canada's most distinguished intellectuals and researchers.

Pineau excels in developing learning and decision-making methods for machines in uncertain environments. Her work in exploration and exploitation within reinforcement learning has earned recognition for its critical role in enhancing AI decision strategies.

Her contributions to using AI healthcare in particular have garnered praise: from personalized oncology treatment to robot-assisted health assistants, including the design of an intelligent robotic wheelchair (the Smartwheeler).

I absolutely support Pineau's call for researchers to open source their code and focus on the importance of 𝐫𝐞𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐢𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 in AI research. Reproducibility is key to the field's progress, enabling researchers to validate study results, ensuring their reliability and preventing cherry-picking. Pineau led the charge at NeurIPS, a leading AI conference, insisting that researchers include both code and comprehensive experiment details in their submissions.

News alert: Meta has recently shifted Pineau's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) lab to report to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, moving from its previous reporting line to the CTO. This change aligns with Meta's vision to integrate advanced AI across all its products and services. Additionally, FAIR has narrowed its focus, discontinuing non-product-oriented research, including protein folding studies.

Last Updated: May 2024