Una-May O'Reilly is the leader of ALFA Group at MIT-CSAIL. ALFA focuses on machine learning technology, evolutionary algorithms, and data science for knowledge mining, prediction, analytics, and optimization. ALFA conducts research in cyber security, software analysis, MOOC technology, and medical technology. Una-May has expertise in agile data science systems with rapid intelligent data analytics capabilities. These systems span organization and visualization of raw data through to machine learning inference. She educates the forthcoming generation of data scientists, teaching them how develop state of art techniques that address the challenges spanning data integration to knowledge extraction.

Una-May hails from Ottawa, Ontario Canada. She completed her undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the University of Calgary in 1985. After 3 years at Bell Northern Research, Una-May completed her MCS (’90) and PhD (’95) in Computer Science at Carleton University. Her PhD dissertation is one of the world’s first on the AI topic of Genetic Programming. She joined MIT as a member of the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1998. She is the author of over 100 academic papers.