Pineau was born in 1974 in Ottawa, Ontario.[2] She played the viola in the Ottawa Symphony Orchestra.[2][3] She eventually studied engineering at the University of Waterloo.[4] During that time, she helped train a voice recognition system for helicopter pilots; when no female pilots were available, Pineau sat in the cockpit to record voices for the system, simulating typical pilot stress levels.[5] Her first job was at Canada's Ministry of Natural Resources, where she developed models focused on solar energy applications in aquaculture.[5] She then completed her postgraduate education in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004.[4][6] A chapter of Pineau's Masters thesis, Point-based value iteration: An anytime algorithm for POMDPs, has been published and cited almost 1,000 times.[7] Her doctoral thesis, Tractable Planning Under Uncertainty: Exploiting Structure, was supervised by Sebastian Thrun and Geoff Gordon.[8]
Research and career
Pineau develops algorithms and models that allow learning in partially complex domains.[4] She is co-director of McGill University's Reasoning and Learning Lab.[9] She founded two start-ups that develop robotic assistants for the elderly; the SmartWheeler initiative and the Nursebot platform.[10][11] SmartWheeler is a multi-modal wheelchair that combines artificial intelligence and robotics.[12]
In 2017 Pineau was appointed the head of the Facebook AI Research Lab in Montreal.[21] She won a Facebook Research Award.[22] She spoke at the third annual Canada 2020 conference.[23] Here she focuses on reinforcement learning, deep learning, computer vision and video understanding.[21] In 2018 she won the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship.[14] She challenges Artificial intelligence research that is not reproducible.[24] She was the reproducibility chair for the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in 2019, where she introduced the requirement of a reproducibility checklist as part of the paper submission process.[25] She is president of the International Machine Learning Society.[26][27] In 2019, Pineau received a Governor General's Innovation Award for her leadership in the innovative applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning to the field of personalized medicine.[28][29] She has climbed the ranks within FAIR and is now leading the entire AI research organization at Meta.
Pineau was elected to the Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023 for her "contributions to research in machine learning, with a focus on Bayesian learning and planning under uncertainty."[30][31]
^ abDivision, Government of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Communications (June 28, 2016). "NSERC - E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowships". www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca. Retrieved July 27, 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
