Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, USA

Deborah McGuinness is the Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair and Professor of Computer, Cognitive, and Web Sciences as well as Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering at RPI. She is also the founding director of the RPI Web Science Research Center.

Deborah has been recognized for her seminal work in explanation, knowledge engineering, ontologies, provenance, and methodologies for creating deployed applications. Her applications have touched a wide range of areas including precision health, exposure science, wireless spectrum, material science, as well as wine and food pairings, just to name a few. She is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), as well as the recipient of the Robert Engelmore Award from AAAI for leadership in Semantic Web research and in bridging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eScience, significant contributions to deployed AI applications, and extensive service to the AI community. She is also the recipient of the lifetime achievement award from the Knowledge Graph conference for outstanding contributions to the field of Knowledge Engineering.

Deborah currently leads a number of large diverse data intensive resource efforts and her team is creating next generation ontology-enabled research infrastructure for work in large interdisciplinary settings. Prior to joining RPI, Deborah was the acting director of the Knowledge Systems, Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Senior Research Scientist in the Computer Science Department of Stanford University, and previous to that she was at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Artificial Intelligence Research. Deborah also has consulted with numerous large corporations as well as emerging startup companies wishing to plan, develop, deploy, and maintain semantic web and/or AI applications. Deborah has also worked as an expert witness in a number of cases, and has deposition and trial experience. Some areas of recent work include: data science, next-generation health advisors, ontology design and evolution environments, semantically-enabled virtual observatories, semantic integration of scientific data, context-aware mobile applications, search, eCommerce, configuration, and supply chain management. Deborah holds a Bachelor of Math and Computer Science from Duke University, her Master of Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University.