Joëlle Pineau

Joëlle Pineau is a Canadian computer scientist and professor at McGill University. Born in Ottawa in 1974, she studied engineering at the University of Waterloo and completed her postgraduate education in robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, where Sebastian Thrun and Geoff Gordon supervised her doctoral thesis on planning under uncertainty.

She develops algorithms that allow learning in partially observable domains and co-directs McGill's Reasoning and Learning Lab. She co-founded two initiatives that developed robotic assistants for the elderly, SmartWheeler and Nursebot, and applied AI to medical scans and seizure detection. In 2017 she was appointed head of Facebook AI Research in Montreal and later became global vice president of Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (now AI at Meta) until May 2025. She is now chief AI officer of Cohere and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 2023.