Craig Boutilier
Positions and Appointments:
He was a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto (on leave) and Canada Research Chair in Adaptive Decision Making for Intelligent Systems. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1992, and worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia from 1991 until his return to Toronto in 1999. He served as Chair of the Department of Computer Science at Toronto from 2004-2010. He was co-founder (with Tyler Lu) of Granata Decision Systems from 2012-2015, until his move to Google in 2015.
Boutilier was a consulting professor at Stanford University from 1998-2000, an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia from 1999-2010, and a visiting professor at Brown University in 1998, at the University of Toronto in 1997-98, at Carnegie Mellon University in 2008-09, and at Université Paris-Dauphine (Paris IX) in the spring of 2011. He served on the Technical Advisory Board of CombineNet, Inc. from 2001 to 2010.
Research:
Boutilier's current research efforts focus on various aspects of decision making under uncertainty, including the use of generative models and LLMs, in areas such as: recommender systems, preference modeling and elicitation, mechanism design, game theory and multiagent decision processes, economic models, social choice, computational advertising, Markov decision processes, reinforcement learning and probabilistic inference.
His research interests have spanned a wide range of topics, from knowledge representation, belief revision, default reasoning, and philosophical logic, to probabilistic reasoning, decision making under uncertainty, multiagent systems, and machine learning.
Research & Academic Service:
Boutilier is a past Editor-in-Chief of the
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR).
He was a past Associate Editor with the
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (TEAC),
the
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR),
the
Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR),
and
Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS);
and he has sat on the editorial/advisory boards of
several other journals.
Boutilier has organized several international conferences and workshops,
including his work as
Program Chair of the
Twenty-first International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-09)
and
Program Chair of the
Sixteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2000).
He has also served on the conference program committees
of roughly 75 leading international conferences.
He will serve as Conference Chair of the Thirty-seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-28).
Awards and Honors:
Boutilier is a Fellow of the
Royal Society of Canada (RSC),
the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
and the
Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence (AAAI). He was the recipient of the 2018
ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award,
He was awarded a
Tier I Canada Research Chair, an Isaac Walton Killam Research
Fellowship, and an IBM Faculty Award. He received the Killam Teaching
Award from the University of British Columbia in 1997. He has also
received a number of Best Paper awards including:
- the 2009 IJCAI-JAIR Best Paper Prize (with R. Brafman, C. Domshlak, H. Hoos, D. Poole, from the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research);
- the 2014 AIJ Prominent Paper Award (with S. Sanner, from the journal Artificial Intelligence);
- the 2018 NeurIPS Best Paper Award (w. T. Lu, D. Schuurmans);
- the 2022 AIJ Prominent Paper Award (with I. Caragiannis, S. Haber, T. Lu, A. Procaccia and O. Sheffet, from the journal Artificial Intelligence);
- the 2023 IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award (with C. Claus, from the International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems)
