Doina Precup

My research interests are in the area of artificial intelligence, machine learning and their applications, especially in medicine and automated control. My main focus is on reinforcement learning, as well as reasoning and planning under uncertainty. My paper introducing the options framework for temporal abstraction in reinforcement learning received the Classic paper award from the Artificial Intelligence journal in 2019. Subsequent work on the option-critic architecture, with my students Pierre-Luc Bacon and Jean Harb, received one of two Outstanding student paper from AAAI. Recently, our paper On the expressivity of Markov reward was selected as one of 6 outstanding papers at NeurIPS’2021.

I was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in the Academy of Science in 2022. I am a senior fellow of CIFAR’s Learning in Machines and Brains program since 2017 and I served as Chair of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy National Program Committee. In 2017, I received the Ideas award from the Creative Destruciton lab , an award recognizing first-order impact on the competitiveness of Canada through the advancement of new ideas in the area of science and technology. I am a senior member of the Association for Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) since 2016.

In 2017 I co-founded the AI4Good lab, a program aimed at improving gender diversity in machine learning. In 2018, I co-founded, with Viorica Patraucean and Razvan Pascanu, the Eastern European Machine Learning Summer School, in order to improve access to education and encourage research in machine learning and artificial intelligence in Eastern Europe.

I currently serve as Associate Scientific Director of Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives, and interdisciplinary neuroscience and big data research initiative at McGill. I also serve as research lead for the Learning research axis of UNIQUE, an FRQNT-funded research center at the intersction of AI and neuroscience research. I am a member of Mila’s scientific committee. I served as associate dean of research in the Faculty of Science at McGill between 2015-2017.

During 2010-2016 I served as member and then chair of the NSERC Discovery Grant evaluation committee in computer science. Subsequently, I was elected as the first president of CSCan-InfoCan. I served 2017-2021 and I am currently on the executive committee as past president.