Joelle Pineau
Joelle Pineau is Cohere’s chief AI officer and a McGill professor on part-time leave. Her research studies planning and learning when a system must act with incomplete information. She trained in engineering at Waterloo and robotics at Carnegie Mellon, then developed academic work spanning robotics, healthcare, and conversational agents. At McGill and Mila, she worked within a wider research community. Her Meta career ran from 2017 to 2025 and included leadership of Fundamental AI Research. Pineau also helped develop the NeurIPS reproducibility program, which used code, checklists, and a community challenge to make experiments easier to examine and repeat. She joined Cohere in 2025. Her current work connects research leadership with enterprise AI development, and she is taking no new graduate students.
- Now at
- McGill University and Cohere
- Works
- 307
- Citations
- 24,366
- h-index
- 68
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
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University study
Engineering and robotics
Pineau studies at Waterloo and earns robotics graduate degrees at Carnegie Mellon.
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McGill and Mila
Research community
She studies planning and learning, with applications in robotics, healthcare, and conversational agents.
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2017–2025
Meta research
Her industry roles include leadership of Fundamental AI Research.
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2019–2020
Reproducibility program
Pineau and colleagues develop and report on the NeurIPS checklist, code policy, and reproducibility challenge.
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August 2025
Cohere appointment
Cohere announces her move to chief AI officer in Montreal.
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October 2026
Current roles
She is Cohere’s chief AI officer and on part-time leave from McGill. She is taking no new graduate students.
Sources and credits
Photo: Gabriel Hutchinson. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
