She earned her B.Sc. degree from the Technical University Cluj-Napoca, Romania (1994) and her M.Sc. (1997) and Ph.D. (2000) degrees from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she was a Fulbright fellow. Her research interests lie in the area of machine learning, with an emphasis on reinforcement learning and time series data, as well as applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence to activity recognition, medicine, electronic commerce and robotics. She currently serves as chair of the NSERC Discovery Evaluation Group for Computer Science.