Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Deborah McGuinness was recently awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award during the 2022 Knowledge Graph Conference, recognizing her contributions in semantics and knowledge graphs.

At Rensselaer, McGuinness is an endowed chair professor in Computer Science, Cognitive Science, and Industrial and Systems Engineering. She is also co-chair of the Tetherless World Constellation (TWC), founding director of the Web Science Research Center, and director of health analytics for the Institute for Data Exploration and Applications (IDEA). McGuinness has a longstanding history of leadership in semantic web research, bridging artificial intelligence (AI) and eScience, and making significant contributions to the AI community. With her teams, she has designed and deployed applications in a wide range of areas ranging from health informatics, personalized medicine, environmental ecosystems, manufacturing, configuration, materials design, drug repurposing, smart product design, and intellectual property litigation.

KGC 2022, a hybrid event, was attended by more than 800 people. The event brought together numerous speakers and partners who collaborated with the audience during workshops and tutorials, including a Healthcare and Life Sciences Symposium organized by McGuinness and several other senior staff from Rensselaer and IBM. Founded at Columbia University in 2019, the KGC is emerging as the premiere source of learning around knowledge graph technologies as it unites leaders across industry sectors to cover the latest in innovation and adoption of knowledge technologies in finance, health care, drug discovery, privacy, cyber, media, education, supply chain, inventory management, e-commerce, personal knowledge graphs, visualization, recommender systems, law firms, real estate, and much more.