Yolanda Gil, Ph.D., is principal scientist and senior director for Strategic Initiatives in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science at the Information Sciences Institute of the University of Southern California. She is also director of AI and Data Science Initiatives in the Viterbi School of Engineering, and research professor of computer science and spatial sciences. Gil received her Master of Science and doctoral degrees in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University, with a focus on AI and cognitive science. 

Gil’s recent research on AI includes task-centered collaboration for water resources, crowdsourcing vocabulary standards for climate data, and model integration for designing interventions in the face of natural disasters. 

Gil received an NSF IIS award for AI-mediated collaboration, where she developed new AI techniques to capture how to define emerging joint tasks and resource needs involving a growing group of human contributors with diverse capabilities and incentives. She discovered that there is great need for these kinds of AI approaches to support interdisciplinary research and worked with a global community focused on understanding the "age" of water and carbon in lake-catchment ecosystems, which refers to the time since water parcels and environmental tracers entered as precipitation.  

She was a key contributor to the NSF EarthCube program for cyberinfrastructure to geosciences. She is best known for leading the Geoscience Papers of the Future initiative, which promotes best principles for reproducible research, open science and digital scholarship across Earth, ocean, atmospheric and geospace sciences. With support from an NSF Robust Intelligence award, she led a workshop on AI research to deepen our understanding of Earth systems. Gil took her work directly into the field, spearheading an NSF EarthCube EC3 (EarthCentered Communication for Cyberinfrastructure) fieldtrip to Yosemite National Park and Owens Valley, where she was joined by computer scientists, geologists and social scientists. There, computer scientists were able to observe the work of geologists in the field, uncovering the cyberinfrastructure and AI needs for field science and bridging the gap between the two disciplines. In 2019, she received the inaugural EarthCube Legacy Award, recognizing her significant and lasting impact in technical foundations, community building and mentoring. 

Gil has also championed several efforts in advancing computer science education. Through an NSF Early-concept Grants for Exploratory Research award, she developed a curriculum for teaching data science to students who are not computer science majors, using real-world datasets and methods. The curriculum included computer science fundamentals, data management, machine learning, scalable computation, visualization, metadata, and provenance.  

In 2019 she co-chaired the Computing Research Association/Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) 20-Year Artificial Intelligence Research Roadmap for the U.S. with key strategic recommendations based on extensive community engagement. She initiated and led the World Wide Web Consortium Provenance Group that resulted in a widely used standard that provides the foundations for trust on the web.  

Gil is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Association for the Advancement of Science. She is also Fellow of the AAAI and served as its 24th president. In 2022, she became the first computer scientist to receive the M. Lee Allison Award for Outstanding Contributions to Geoinformatics and Data Science from the Geological Society of America.