Joelle Pineau’s curiosity led her to pursue a doctorate in engineering with a focus on robotics, which she describes as her “gateway into AI.” As vice president of AI research at Meta, Joelle leads a team committed to openness in the service of high-quality research, responsible AI development, and community contribution.

In this episode, Joelle, who is also a professor at McGill University, weighs the advantages industry and academia each have for conducting artificial intelligence research. She also describes specific AI research projects Meta is working on, including scientific discovery initiatives focused on addressing societal problems like carbon capture. Read the episode transcript here.

Guest bio:

Joelle Pineau is vice president of AI research at Meta and a professor at McGill University. Her research focuses primarily on developing new models and algorithms for planning and learning in complex, partially observable domains. She also applies these algorithms to robotics, health care, games, and conversational agents. Pineau serves on the board of the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and the Journal of Machine Learning Research. She has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Waterloo and master’s degree and doctorate in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.

Me, Myself, and AI is a collaborative podcast from MIT Sloan Management Review and Boston Consulting Group and is hosted by Sam Ransbotham and Shervin Khodabandeh. Our engineer is David Lishansky, and the coordinating producers are Allison Ryder and Andy Goffin.

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