Deborah McGuinness

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Tetherless World Senior Constellation Chair and Professor of Computer and Cognitive Science

Biography

Deborah McGuinness has been recognized with awards from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI ) for leadership in Semantic Web research and in bridging Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eScience, significant contributions to deployed AI applications, and extensive service to the AI community. She is a leading authority on the semantic web and has been working in knowledge representation and reasoning environments for over 35 years. Deborah’s primary research thrusts include ontologies, provenance, escience, open data, and semantically-enabled schema and data integration for a wide range of informatics , recommender, and configuration applications.

Deborah is also widely known for her leading role in the development of the W3C Recommended Web Ontology Language (OWL), her work on earlier description logic languages and environments, and work on provenance languages and environments, including InferenceWeb, PML, and PROV. She has built and deployed numerous ontology environments and ontology-enhanced applications, including some that have been in continuous use for over a decade, and two that have won deployment awards for variation reduction on plant floors and interdisciplinary virtual observatories. Recent application thrusts include health informatics and smart environmental monitoring. She has published over 400 peer-reviewed papers and has authored granted patents in knowledge based systems, ontology environments, configuration, and search technology.

Deborah also in intellectual property expert witness work and has deposition and trial experience. She also consults with clients wishing to plan, develop, deploy, and maintain semantic web and/or AI applications. Some areas of recent work include: data science, next generation health advisors, ontology design and evolution environments, semantically-enabled virtual observatories, semantic integration of scientific data, context-aware mobile applications, search, eCommerce, configuration, and supply chain management.

Talks and Events

Knowledge Graphs in Today’s Evolving Landscape (and Beyond)

The Artificial Intelligence landscape is changing at an unprecedented pace.   Powerful AI tools and services have amazed both the general public as well as many seasoned AI researchers. Like all technologies, however, challenges remain.  Many remaining challenges for large language models and generative AI align with strengths of knowledge graphs and semantic AI.  In this talk, we will discuss topics including context, abstraction, and provenance to help motivate discussions about directions and opportunities for our field(s).