McGuinness completed her Ph.D. in computer science from
Rutgers University in 1997 with a thesis titled “Explaining Reasoning in Description Logics”. She received a master's degree in computer science from the
University of California, Berkeley (1981) and a Bachelor of Science in computer science and Bachelor of Arts (BA) in mathematics from
Duke University (1980).
Career
McGuinness’ career began in 1980 as a technical staff member for
AT&T Bell Labs where for eighteen years, she worked in Artificial Intelligence applied and fundamental research, with business rotations in Home Information Systems, Home Communication Systems and managed an emerging technologies and applications group for AT&T's personal online services.
From 1998 to 2007, McGuinness served as co-director and senior research scientist and later acting director in the Knowledge Systems Laboratory (KSL), Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at Stanford University.[2]
In October 2007, she joined the faculty at RPI and became an endowed constellation chair with
James Hendler, within the
Tetherless World Constellation. While at RPI, she became the founding director of the Web Science Research Center and Director of Health Analytics at the Institute for Data Exploration and Application (IDEA).[3]
McGuinness is CEO and president of her own consulting firm for clients wishing to plan, develop, deploy, and maintain semantic web and/or AI applications.
She also is an inventor on 5 patents and has served as an expert witness in a number of cases, many in the area of configuration.[4]
Research
McGuinness has worked in knowledge representation and reasoning environments, and their applications, for over 40 years. She has led multimillion-dollar, government sponsored research efforts, many in multi-disciplinary areas, delivering long-lived software and world class publishable results on topics including but not limited to health, exposure, cancer, smoking and drug repurposing research.
McGuinness is known for her work on
description logics, particularly her work on the CLASSIC knowledge representation system, explanation components for
description logics, and a number of applications of description logics such as the PROSE and QUESTAR configurators from AT&T and Lucent Laboratories. She was integral in the creation of
DARPA Agent Markup Language (DAML) and the KSL Wine Agent.
She co-authored the
World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)'s recommendation for an
Ontology Web Language (OWL) and provenance language (PROV) recommendations and the
Proof Markup Language (PML) for representing knowledge provenance. She started Stanford's explanation effort, called Inference Web, that aims to provide infrastructure for improving trust and understand-ability of answers in distributed environments, such as the web.
Through her involvement in a variety of research areas, including those mentioned above, McGuiness is successfully leading the design and development of multi-disciplinary health and environmental informatics platforms and applications. Notable recent projects include: the Health Empowerment by Analytics, Learning, and Semantics (HEALS) project,[5] a joint IBM-RPI effort; the Human and Children's Health Exposure Analysis Resource projects (HHEAR)[6] and (CHEAR),[7] funded by NIH; the DARPA-funded Machine Commonsense (MCS) program and the Multi-modal Open World Grounded Learning and Inference (MOWGLI) project[8] and a Food Security project; the Human-Aware Data Acquisition Infrastructure (HADatAc) project,[9] the Jefferson project,[10] a joint IBM Research, RPI and Lake George Association collaboration, and the MaterialsMine project.[11]
Robert S. Engelmore Memorial Lecture Award from Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Award: “for leadership in Semantic Web research and in bridging AI and eScience, significant contributions to deployed AI applications, and extensive service to the AI community” (2013)[19]
Best Paper Award, 46th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science: “Information Technology in Healthcare Track” (2013)[20]
Fellow, Web Science Trust Research Initiative (2007)
Deployed application award from the Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence Conference for the Virtual Solar Terrestrial Observatory (2005, 2007)
Health Web Science, with Joanne S. Luciano, Grant P. Cumming, Eva Kahana, Mark D. Wilkinson, Elizabeth H Brooks, Dominick DiFranzo, and Holly Jarman (2014), Now Publishers Inc.
Transforming the study of organisms: Phenomic data models and knowledge bases, Anne Thessen, Ramona Walls, Lars Vogt, Jessica Singer, Robert Warren, Pier Luigi Butt Pier Luigi Buttigieg, James P. Balhoff, Christopher J. Mungall, Deborah L. McGuinness, Brian J. Stucky, Matthew J. Yoder, Melissa A. Haendel, PLOS Computational Biology, Nov 2020.
Windows of susceptibility by temporal Gene Analysis, Kristin P Bennett, Elisabeth M Brown, Hannah De los Santos, Matthew Poegel, Thomas R Kiehl, Evan W Patton, Spencer Norris, Sally Temple, John Erickson, Deborah L McGuinness, Nathan C Boles, Scientific reports. Volume 9, Issue 1, Feb 2019.