Brent Venable

Brent’s research sits at the intersection of AI-based preference reasoning and cognitive modeling of human decision making, with the goal of designing intelligent systems that are both adaptive and human-aware. Her work focuses on developing automated models of preference to support decision-making in applications such as recommender systems, human-machine teaming, and behavioral modeling. More recently, she has explored the ethical implications of AI technologies and their potential for advancing social good. She is the co-author of two books and has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles in leading AI journals and conferences. She collaborates with a number of premier research institutions, including NASA Ames, IBM Research, and NICTA, and her work has been supported by agencies such as NASA, ONR, ARL, NIH, NSF, the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative, and the Future of Life Institute. Brent graduated Magna Cum Laude in Pure Mathematics from the University of Padova, Italy, and earned her Ph.D. in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence with a dissertation on automatically learning preferences over schedules, developed at NASA Ames in support of the Mars Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. She is currently a Senior Research Scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) and serves as Director of the IHMC–University of West Florida Ph.D. program in Intelligent Systems and Robotics. She is also a Professor of Computer Science at the University of West Florida. Previously, she held a joint appointment with Tulane University, where she joined as an Associate Professor in 2012 and was promoted to Professor in 2018. Before moving to the U.S., she was a tenured Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Padova.