Deborah McGuinness


Deborah Louise McGuinness is an American computer scientist and Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where she holds an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Research Constellation. She is working in the field of artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, explanation, and trust.

Education

McGuinness received a Bachelor of Science in math and computer science from Duke University. While working for AT&T Bell Labs at Murray Hill and, later, AT&T Labs Research at Florham Park, she completed a master's degree in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rutgers University in 1996.

Career and research

Her work at AT&T Bell labs was focused in the Artificial Intelligence Research Department, with business rotations in Home Information Systems, Home Communication Systems and later ran an emerging technologies and applications group for AT&T's personal online services.
In 1998, McGuinness made a move to Stanford University where she was co-director and senior research scientist at the Knowledge Systems Laboratory.
In October 2007 she became faculty at RPI, where she joined another well known semantic web expert, James Hendler on the Tetherless World Research Constellation. Today, the Constellation Chair team numbers 3 to include Peter Fox. While at RPI, McGuinness has taken research leadership roles in the design and development of multi-disciplinary health and environmental informatics platforms and applications.
In November, 2013, McGuinness was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She was recognized by AAAS for outstanding contributions and leadership in the areas of ontologies, semantic web, eScience, open data, and semantic data resources.
In addition to her research activities she is also CEO and president of her own consulting firm for clients wishing to plan, develop, deploy, and maintain semantic web and/or AI applications. She serves on the board of the Semantic Web Science Foundation as well as a number of start-up companies.
McGuinness has worked in knowledge representation and reasoning environments, and their applications, for over 35 years including health applications for 20 years. She has led multimillion-dollar, government sponsored research efforts, many in multi-disciplinary areas, and has delivered long-lived software and world class publishable results in areas including creating, evolving, linking, and evaluating ontologies and data science in many areas of science, such as health, exposure, cancer, smoking, and drug re-purposing research.
McGuinness is known for her work on description logics, particularly her work on the CLASSIC knowledge representation system, explanation components for description logics, and a number of long-lived applications of description logics such as the PROSE and QUESTAR configurators from AT&T and Lucent Laboratories. She was integral in the creation of DARPA Agent Markup Language, and the KSL Wine Agent.
She is also well known in the field for co-authoring the World Wide Web Consortium 's recommendation for an Ontology Web Language and provenance language recommendations. She also started Stanford's explanation effort, called Inference Web, that aims to provide infrastructure for improving trust and understand-ability of answers in distributed environments, such as the web. She is co-author of the Proof Markup Language for representing knowledge provenance.
McGuinness continues to be involved in a variety of research relating to the semantic web, trustable systems and web integration platforms for portable devices.

Honors and awards

Books:
Journals, a selection:
Recent Conference Publications: