Yolanda Gil

I am Principal Investigator and Project Leader of the Interactive Knowledge Capture research group at USC's Information Sciences Institute (ISI). My research focuses on intelligent interfaces for knowledge capture, which is a central topic in our projects concerning knowledge-based planning and problem solving, information analysis and assessment of trust, semantic annotation tools, agent and software choreography, and community-wide development of knowledge bases. A recent focus is assisting scientists with large-scale applications throught the design of workflows and their distributed execution.

I am the Associate Division Director for Research of the Intelligent Systems Division at ISI. The division is home to more than one hundred AI researchers and PhD students. If you would like to visit us, learn more about AI at ISI, or join our research group, please contact me!

I am also Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at USC. I advise students, teach courses on occasion, and oversee PhD student recruiting and funding for the department. I also serve in the Advisory Committee on National and International Graduate Fellowships at USC.

Before coming to ISI in 1992, I received my PhD in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. My thesis focused on the acquisition of planning knowledge through the formulation of deliberate experiments with the environment.

Foaf, short bio, longer bio, CV, roster of awards and grants.

What's New

Check out my upcoming AAAI-08 tutorial on "Computational Workflows for Large-Scale AI Research", Sunday July 13 2008 in Chicago.

I have become very active in pushing a new area: the use of AI techniques to support large-scale scientific analysis. There is a lot of information about our research on scientific workflows in Wings and Pegasus, see the recent publications below or this recent article:

There is a lot of good introductory information in the Final Report of the NSF Workshop on Challenges of Scientific Workflows that I recently co-chaired, summarized in this article:

Check out also a talk that I gave at the US National Science Foundation titled Artificial Intelligence and Cyberinfrastructure: Workflow Planning and Beyond. There is also material and slides from a panel I organized at IAAI-04 on The Broader Role of Artificial Intelligence in Large-Scale Science Research. I co-edited a special issue of IEEE Intelligent Systems on e-science, together with David DeRoure and Jim Hendler, in January 2004. The Guest Editor's Introduction and Table of Contents are available on-line. Also take a look at my presentations and other materials available from a Dagstuhl seminar on Semantic Grid held on July 2005.

Contact information:

Information Sciences Institute
University of Southern California
4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001
Marina del Rey, CA 90292
at isi.edu with user gil
Phone: (310) 448-8794
Fax: (310) 823-6714
Office: 941W

Assistant: Alma Nava (at isi.edu with user anava)

USC campus office (by appointment only): SAL 234

Research Interests and Projects

You can find more details about my research in the web pages of the Interactive Knowledge Capture research group. Very recent projects also can be found at the new awards roster.

Research Interests

Current Projects

Roster of awards and grants

Application Areas

I am very interested in applying Artificial Intelligence techniques to practical problems. I have worked on several challenging areas including process planning, configuration design, air campaign planning, logistics, and course of action development. Some of the new areas that I am working on include intelligence analysis, special operations, competitive intelligence, earthquake science, and grid computing.

Professional Activities

Conferences and Meetings

I chair the AAAI Conference Committee. Please drop me a note if you have suggestions or ideas about future conferences. New this year will be:

We hope to see you at AAAI-08 in Chicago!

I am involved with the organization of the K-CAP conference series. The Fourth International Conference on Knowledge Capture, was held on October 28-31, 2007 in Whistler, Canada. The next conference will be held in 2009.

I was program co-chair of AAAI-06. We developed an extensive and innovative Call for Papers, many of the new submission tracks continue in the 2007 conference. I was program co-chair of the Fourth International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2005). I was co-chair of the tutorial program for AAAI-05. I regularly review for AAAI, IAAI, IUI (I was program chair in 2002), ISWC, and EKAW. I have also been in the program committee, though less frequently, for ICAPS, ICML (I was area chair in 2002), and KR.

There are two excellent papers that I strongly recommend to reviewers of conferences: "The health of research conferences and the dearth of big idea papers", by David Patterson and "Reviewing the reviewers", by Ken Church.

Journals

I am on the Editorial Board of the new journals Journal of Web Semantics and Applied Ontology. I am also Associate Editor of Cognitive Science, and Editorial Board member of IEEE Intelligent Systems, The Semantic Web, and The Knowledge Engineering Review.

National Science Foundation (NSF)

I serve in the Advisory Committee of the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Directorate.

American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)

I was elected in 2003 by AAAI members to a three year term in the AAAI council. If you have suggestions or comments about activities that AAAI should consider being involved with, please drop us a note. I remain in the council as Chair of the AAAI Conference Committee.

Academic Activities

I chaired the Graduate Student Assistance Committee (GSAC) of the Computer Science Department at USC for more than a decade. In coordination with the Admissions Committee, we work on organizing the recruiting and funding of incoming PhD graduate students. The Computer Science Department received an increased number of fellowships over the years. Look here for useful pointers for students about applying to a CS PhD program, surviving as a PhD student, doing research, etc.

I serve regularly in the Advisory Committee on National and International Graduate Fellowships at USC.

I taught CS541 on "Artificial Intelligence Planning" on several semesters.

Selected Publications

(Organized by topic in project pages)

Last updated: August 31, 2005