FCS Distinguished Lecture Series: Craig Boutilier

Published

April 28, 2026

Event announcement poster

Craig Boutilier speaking

Event Details

📅 Date/Time: 28th of April, 11:30–13:00

🏫 Location: Mona Campbell Room 1108

🗣️ Speaker: Craig Boutilier, Principal Scientist at Google Research

💬 Title: On the Role of LLMs in Human Decision Making

Abstract

The rapid emergence of large language models (LLMs) and Generative AI (GenAI) has fundamentally redefined the broad availability and usage of AI. This talk assesses the critical role GenAI can play in supporting human decision-making. Using conversational recommender systems as a lens, I will detail how LLMs can both enhance the quality of decision outcomes and facilitate significantly more natural and effective user interaction. The discussion will cover key techniques, including LLMs for preference elicitation, decision critiquing, and user simulation. Finally, I will outline the current challenges and future directions required to establish LLMs as even more robust decision-support companions.

Bio

Craig Boutilier is a Principal Scientist at Google Research. After receiving his B.Sc. (Honors) in Computer Science from Dalhousie in 1986 and his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in 1992, he held professorships at the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto, where he chaired the Department of Computer Science. He has also held visiting positions at Stanford, Brown, CMU, and Paris-Dauphine, and co-founded Granata Decision Systems.

With over 200 publications, his research focuses on decision-making under uncertainty, reinforcement learning, recommender systems, preference elicitation and user modeling, multi-agent systems, and computational economics. He has served as Program Chair for UAI-2000 and IJCAI-09, and as Editor-in-Chief of JAIR. He is the Conference Chair for IJCAI-28.

Boutilier is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC), the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). His honors include the 2018 ACM/SIGAI Autonomous Agents Research Award, a Tier I Canada Research Chair, and various best paper awards, fellowships, and teaching awards.