Randy Goebel

Randy Goebel

Fellow

Academic Affiliations

Professor – University of Alberta (Computing Science); Principal Investigator – xAI Lab (University of Alberta)

Industry and Research Affiliations

Scientific Advisory Board, Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz (DFKI, German Research Center for AI); Advisory Board – BIAS – Responsible AI for Labour Market Equality, Holistic AI (UK), Intellicon (South Korea), Scientific Advisor Creative Destruction Lab Rockies (Calgary).

Areas of Expertise

Artificial intelligence; machine learning; natural language processing; explainable AI; knowledge representation; visualization; logic-based non-deductive reasoning; computational linguistics; belief revision; systems biology

Randy Goebel is interested in the logic of machine learning, employing non-deductive reasoning to build theoretical models that accurately describe and predict the world.

Unpacking the black box

Randy Goebel is interested in the logic of machine learning, employing non-deductive reasoning to build theoretical models that accurately describe and predict the world. His research currently focuses on the development and application of non-deductive reasoning techniques (non-monotonic reasoning and belief revision) and their application to automated diagnosis, scheduling, database mining, and related areas. He focuses on the challenge of retaining the clarity and robustness of good theory while making progress in deployment in real applications. Randy also works on the development of constraint languages and algorithms for restricted classes of application domains. These include personnel scheduling, high school timetabling, and the parallel development of visualization and user interaction tools to help develop specifications for these problems. Randy applies his work to create hypotheses on protein structures, for the automatic formation of semantic indexing structures that can support content-based retrieval of text and images, which includes creating competition-winning legal reasoning systems.

Randy is a Fellow and Member of the Board of Directors at Amii and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta where he also held the position of Associate Vice President (Academic). He was one of four original founding researchers of Amii and currently is a Fellow and sits on our Board of Directors. He is also the interim Executive Director of the NRC/UAlberta Nanotechnology initiative, a member of the scientific advisory board of DFKI (the German Institute for AI), the China Institute at the University of Alberta, and sits on the National Program Committee of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy. He is also a scientific advisor to ROSS Intelligence (Toronto, CA), Intellicon (Seoul, KR), and AI Fred (Montréal, CA). Over his career, Randy has supervised more than 85 early-stage researchers at the MSc, PhD and Post-doctoral Fellow levels, and he has published more than 200 publications including refereed and invited papers and publications in books. He is a highly-regarded speaker, having delivered talks at academic conferences and institutions as well as businesses and governmental organizations around the world.