Yolanda Gil’s path to AI began far from computers, in the Spanish countryside, surrounded by novels, not machines. It wasn’t until she came to the U.S. for graduate school, unaware of what a Ph.D. even entailed, that she stepped fully into the world of artificial intelligence. At Carnegie Mellon, she immersed herself in the emerging ideas of machine learning, human-computer collaboration, and cognitive systems.

That curiosity led her to USC’s Information Sciences Institute, where she helped build early intelligent agents that could explain themselves, reason from failure, and even manage to-do lists—ideas that would later shape systems like Siri and Wikidata. As a leading voice in the AI community, Gil has consistently pushed for technologies that serve science and society, earning her roles as president of AAAI, chair of ACM SIGAI, and, in 2024, an appointment to the National Science Board. Her work continues to ask one of AI’s most human questions: not just what machines can do, but how they can understand us and help us understand the world.