Viterbi Faculty Directory

Biography

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Dr. Yolanda Gil is a Fellow at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California, where she serves as Senior Director of AI and Data Science Initiatives and Director of the Center on Artificial Intelligence for Health. She is also a Research Professor in Computer Science and in Spatial Sciences. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, with a focus on artificial intelligence and cognitive science. Dr. Gil collaborates with scientists in many domains on semantic workflows and metadata capture, social knowledge collection, provenance and trust, task-centered collaboration, and automated discovery. In 2019 she co-chaired the CRA/AAAI 20-Year Artificial Intelligence Research Roadmap for the US with key strategic recommendations based on extensive community contributions. She initiated and led the W3C Provenance Group that led to a widely-used standard that provides the foundations for trust on the Web. She is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Cognitive Science Society (CSS). She is also Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and served as its 24th President. Gil was the first computer scientist to receive the Geological Society of America (GSA) M Lee Allison Award for Outstanding Contributions to Geoinformatics and Data Science. She serves as Co-Chair of the Stanford AI Index. In 2024, Gil was appointed to the National Science Board (NSB) for a 6 year term by President Biden.