Reihaneh Rabbany

Reihaneh Rabbany is a computer scientist at McGill University and Mila whose work applies AI to human trafficking and online misinformation. She completed a PhD at the University of Alberta and a postdoctoral fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University before joining McGill, and in 2018 she was among the first Canada CIFAR AI Chairs at Mila. In 2021, she worked with a Carnegie Mellon team on InfoShield, an algorithm that detects organized human-trafficking activity in online escort ads, and in 2023 she coauthored the Temporal Graph Benchmark for evaluating models on temporal graphs. A 2025 paper on misinformation detection data and evaluation, which she coauthored, received the Best DB Track Paper Runner-Up Award at KDD. She is an associate professor of computer science at McGill, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and head of the Complex Data Lab.

Now at: McGill University and Mila

Timeline

By 2018

Alberta PhD, Carnegie Mellon postdoc

She completes a PhD in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and works as a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science before joining McGill. In 2015, she coauthors a Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery paper with Osmar R. Zaiane on clustering agreements and distances for overlapping clusters and network communities.
2018

A Canada CIFAR AI Chair

In 2018, she is among the 14 Mila researchers selected in the first cohort of Canada CIFAR AI Chairs. At the time she is an assistant professor at McGill University working on data mining, network science and computational social science.
2020–2025

An app to verify online information

A CIFAR AI Catalyst Grant in 2020 starts her collaboration with Jean-François Godbout on misinformation. In January 2025, they are creating a user-facing app that verifies the authenticity of online information, with a language model that retrieves documents and news sources from the open web.
2021

InfoShield against human trafficking

In April 2021, she and her McGill students Aayushi Kulshrestha and Sacha Levy collaborate with a Carnegie Mellon team led by Christos Faloutsos on InfoShield, which the team presents at the IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering. The algorithm clusters similar online escort ads to detect organized human-trafficking activity and flags trafficking ads with 85% precision.
2023

The Temporal Graph Benchmark

In 2023, she coauthors the Temporal Graph Benchmark with Shenyang Huang, Farimah Poursafaei, Jure Leskovec, Michael Bronstein and others. It is a collection of large-scale datasets for evaluating machine learning models on temporal graphs, published in the NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks Track.
2024

Chair renewed by CIFAR and Mila

In February 2024, CIFAR and Mila renew her Canada CIFAR AI Chair, which supports her work on AI techniques against human trafficking and on methods to detect misinformation. Mila's Infrared tool, where she is a core academic member, ranks archived online ads by relevance and groups connected activity for survivors seeking justice.
2025

A KDD runner-up award

In 2025, "A Guide to Misinformation Detection Data and Evaluation", coauthored with Jean-François Godbout, Kellin Pelrine and colleagues, receives the Best DB Track Paper Runner-Up Award at the KDD conference.
As of October 2026

Associate professor at McGill

She is an associate professor of computer science at McGill University, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair, and a core academic member of Mila. She heads McGill's Complex Data Lab, which works at the intersection of network science, data mining and machine learning, and she is on the faculty of McGill's Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship.