Doina Precup is a Romanian researcher currently living in Montreal, Canada, specializing in artificial intelligence (AI). She is associate dean of research at the faculty of science at McGill University, Canada research chair in machine learning, and a senior fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Precup also heads the Montreal office of Google DeepMind, where she conducts fundamental research on reinforcement learning.
Education
Precup said she was drawn to artificial intelligence at a young age through her interest in science fiction, where robots are often portrayed as useful and benevolent. Her mother was a university professor of computer science in Romania, and several women in her family pursued successful careers in science. She obtained a bachelor of science degree in computer science and engineering (magna cum laude) at Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in 1994, followed by a master of science in 1995. She left Romania in 1995 on a Fulbright scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she earned a master's degree in 1997 and a PhD in 2000.
Academic career
Precup was recruited as an assistant professor by McGill University's School of Computer Science in 2000 and has since lived in the Montreal area. She teaches at McGill while conducting research on machine learning and reinforcement learning, focusing on AI applications with social impact, such as medical imaging in health care. Her work addresses machine decision-making in situations where uncertainty is high, contributing to advances in Deep learning and Neural network methods.
Industry leadership
In 2017, Precup was appointed to lead the Montreal office of the artificial intelligence firm Deepmind, owned by Google. The office became part of Google DeepMind after a reorganization, and Precup continues to oversee research there. Her role bridges academic research and industry application, particularly in reinforcement learning, a subfield of Machine learning that trains agents to make sequences of decisions.
Advocacy and recognition
Precup is a senior fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and a member of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms. She co-founded the AI4Good Lab, an organization aimed at increasing the participation of women in AI study and work, and serves as its advisor. With four other AI researchers - Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Rich Sutton, and Ian Kerr - she sent a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister in 2017 urging action on the risks posed by AI-controlled weapons. Her contributions have been recognized through her research chair and fellowships, though specific award details are not publicly listed.
Impact
Precup's work spans fundamental AI research and practical applications, influencing both academic theory and industry practice. Her leadership at Google DeepMind's Montreal office has strengthened the connection between Canadian academic AI and global research efforts. Through her advocacy and mentorship, she has worked to address gender imbalance in technology, drawing on her own experience of only becoming aware of the disparity after moving to North America. Her research on reinforcement learning continues to inform developments in areas like Artificial intelligence and Large language model systems.