He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Toronto in 1992, and worked as an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia from 1991 until his return to Toronto in 1999. Boutilier's research interests have spanned a wide range of topics, from knowledge representation, belief revision, default reasoning, and philosophical logic, to probabilistic reasoning, decision making under uncertainty, multiagent systems, and machine learning. His current research efforts focus on various aspects of decision making under uncertainty: Markov decision processes, game theory and multiagent decision processes, economic models, reinforcement learning, probabilistic inference and preference elicitation.