Deborah McGuinness

Deborah Louise McGuinness (born ca. 1960) is an American computer scientist and researcher at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). She is a professor of Computer, Cognitive and Web Sciences, Industrial and Systems Engineering, and an endowed chair in the Tetherless World Constellation, a multidisciplinary research institution within RPI that focuses on the study of theories, methods and applications of the World Wide Web. Her fields of expertise include interdisciplinary data integration, artificial intelligence, specifically in knowledge representation and reasoning, description logics, the semantic web, explanation, and trust.

McGuinness completed her Ph. D. in computer science from Rutgers University in 1997 with a thesis titled “Explaining Reasoning in Description Logics”. She received a master's degree in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley (1981) and a Bachelor of Science in computer science and Bachelor of Arts (BA) in mathematics from Duke University (1980).

McGuinness’ career began in 1980 as a technical staff member for AT&T Bell Labs where for eighteen years, she worked in Artificial Intelligence applied and fundamental research, with business rotations in Home Information Systems, Home Communication Systems and managed an emerging technologies and applications group for AT&T's personal online services. From 1998 to 2007, McGuinness served as co director and senior research scientist and later acting director in the Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL), Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University. In October 2007, she joined the faculty at RPI and became an endowed constellation chair with James Hendler, within the Tetherless World Constellation. While at RPI, she became the founding director of the Web Science Research Center and Director of Health Analytics at the Institute for Data Exploration and Application (IDEA). McGuinness is CEO and president of her own consulting firm for clients wishing to plan, develop, deploy, and maintain semantic web and/or AI applications. She also is an inventor on 5 patents and has served as an expert witness in a number of cases, many in the area of configuration.

McGuinness has worked in knowledge representation and reasoning environments, and their applications, for over 40 years. She has led multimillion dollar, government sponsored research efforts, many in multi disciplinary areas, delivering long lived software and world class publishable results on topics including but not limited to health, exposure, cancer, smoking and drug repurposing 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 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 (DAML) and the KSL Wine Agent. She co authored the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s recommendation for an Ontology Web Language (OWL) and provenance language (PROV) recommendations and the Proof Markup Language (PML) for representing knowledge provenance. She 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. Through her involvement in a variety of research areas, including those mentioned above, McGuiness is successfully leading the design and development of multi disciplinary health and environmental informatics platforms and applications. Notable recent projects include: the Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning, and Semantics (HEALS) project, a joint IBM RPI effort; the Human and Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource projects (HHEAR) and (CHEAR), funded by NIH; the DARPA funded Machine Commonsense (MCS) program and the Multi modal Open World Grounded Learning and Inference (MOWGLI) project and a Food Security project; the Human Aware Data Acquisition Infrastructure (HADatAc) project, the Jefferson project, a joint IBM Research, RPI and Lake George Association collaboration, and the MaterialsMine project.