Sheila McIlraith

Sheila McIlraith is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto (U of T), a Canada CIFAR AI Chair (Vector Institute), and an Associate Director and Research Lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. McIlraith is author of over 150 scholarly publications in the areas of knowledge representation, automated reasoning, and machine learning. Her work focuses on AI sequential decision making, broadly construed, through the lens of human-compatible AI. McIlraith is a fellow of the ACM and AAAI. She currently serves as Chair of the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) and as a member of the Canadian AI Safety Institute Research Council. McIlraith initiated and co-leads the U of T Embedded Ethics Education Initiative (E3I) which has been honoured with university and national awards for innovation and impact. McIlraith and co-authors have been recognized with a number of honours for their scholarly contributions including the 2011 SWSA Ten-Year Award, the ICAPS 2022 Influential Paper Award, and the 2023 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize, each retrospectively honouring influential work. In 2024, McIlraith was recognized with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian AI Society (CAIAC) for outstanding research excellence in AI.

AI2050 Project

Mutual understanding is a cornerstone of trust and a precursor to cooperation. Social cognition is one way in which such understanding can be enhanced. In her AI2050 project, McIlraith endeavors to endow AI with Purposeful Theory of Mind capabilities—the ability not only to attribute mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions to itself and to others, but also to purposefully contemplate the impact of its decision-making and actions on the welfare and agency of others, and to be incentivized to choose actions that realize its objectives in consideration of the welfare and agency of others.