Dr. Robin Cohen

Since obtaining her PhD degree in 1983, Dr. Cohen has made significant and sustained contributions to the field of AI.  Dr. Cohen has a lifetime total of over 235 refereed publications (including 10 book chapters, more than 45 journal papers, and over 180 refereed conference and workshop papers) and has made deep contributions  to AI, including  to the areas of computational linguistics, user modeling, temporal reasoning, plan recognition, agents, and trust and reputation modeling in electronic marketplaces.  Robin’s PhD thesis was one of the first theses at the intersection of computational linguistics and natural language pragmatics. The publications that arose out of her thesis have garnered many citations and have been influential in follow-on work, including the seminal work of Grosz and Sidner on discourse structures. More recently, Robin and her co-authors’work on trust and reputation models has received a lot of attention, especially their surprising result that trust models presented in the literature contain vulnerabilities. What is especially noteworthy about Robin’s research program is that these notable research results have been attained in several distinct subfields of artificial intelligence, enriching various major communities that comprise the field of artificial intelligence. Prof. Cohen is widely recognized for her leadership in graduate education in artificial intelligence and her graduate student mentorship and supervision. Under her supervision seven of her graduate students have won significant awards including the Governor General Gold Medal (top PhD student at University of Waterloo, two different students), the Alumni Gold Medal(top Master's student at University of Waterloo, two different students), the Outstanding Achievement in Graduate Studies Award (top Master's student in Faculty of Mathematics, two different students)  and CAIAC Best Ph.D. Thesis Award.  Many of her students have gone on to distinguished careers of their own including seven who are faculty members at various universities (SFU, U. of Guelph, U. of Waterloo, U. of Ottawa, UNB, NTU, and IIT Delhi), and many others who have gone on to industry (including Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Google, and IBM T.J. Watson), or been inspired to continue on to graduate school (including MIT, Stanford, Washington, and Princeton). Dr. Cohen has served on many program committees including  AAAI, IJCAI, and AAMAS as well as numerous other conferences and workshops, and has been program co-chair of the Canadian AI conference in 2002. She has served on the editorial boards of Computational Linguistics, User Modeling and User Adaptive Interaction, and Computational Intelligence.  Dr. Cohen has been awarded with CAIAC Life Time Achievement Award and became Fellow of CAIAC in 2018.