Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Deborah McGuinness has been elected a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) “for significant contributions to the semantic web, knowledge representation and reasoning environments, and deployed artificial intelligence applications.” AAAI is a nonprofit scientific society that promotes research in artificial intelligence and its responsible use. The AAAI fellows program recognizes people who have “made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence.”

“It is a great honor to be recognized by AAAI,” McGuinness said. “Artificial intelligence is poised to provide disruptive technology, possibly making long-lasting impacts in many disciplines. It is a fascinating field.”

McGuinness is an endowed chair professor in computer science, cognitive science, and industrial and systems engineering. She also co-chairs the Tetherless World Constellation (TWC) and is the founding director of the RPI Web Science Research Center. McGuinness has a longstanding history of leadership in fundamental and applied semantic web research, bridging artificial intelligence (AI) and eScience, and creating explainable, provenance-aware AI environments and applications. With her teams, she has designed and deployed applications in a wide range of areas including health informatics, personalized medicine, environmental ecosystems, manufacturing, configuration, materials design, drug repurposing, smart product design, and intellectual property litigation.

McGuinness’ achievements include over 500 publications including books such as Description Logic (2nd edition 2007), Ontology Engineering (2019), Provenance in Data Science (2001), and Health Web Science (2014). She holds four patents. McGuinness has served as an expert witness in numerous cases including deposition and testimony. She has chaired or co-chaired international conferences on the semantic web (ISWC-2021), web science (WebSci-2017), information and knowledge management (CIKM-2007), AI (AAAI-2004), and knowledge representation and reasoning (KR&R-2002).

McGuinness’ research is supported by the Intelligence Advanced Research Agency (IARPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS),  IBM,  Cisco, LGS, CACI, and more. She is a fellow of the American Association of the Advancement of Science, has received a lifetime achievement award from the Knowledge Graph Conference for “outstanding contributions to the field of knowledge engineering,” and has been recognized with the Robert Engelmore award from AAAI for “leadership in Semantic Web research and in bridging AI and eScience, significant contributions to deployed AI applications, and extensive service to the AI community."