MIE professor Mark Fox has been elected a 2026 fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC). The RSC’s mission is to advance knowledge, encourage integrated interdisciplinary understanding and address issues that are critical to Canada and Canadians. Fellowship in the RSC is one of the highest honours a Canadian scholar can achieve.

Fox was one of the first researchers to explore the use of artificial intelligence in industrial systems. In his early work at Carnegie Mellon University, he developed the concept of constraint directed scheduling, which is used in many modern scheduling systems today. He also pioneered the application of artificial intelligence to project management, simulation and engineering design. In 1984, Fox co-founded Carnegie Group Inc., a software company that specialized in AI-based systems for solving engineering, manufacturing and telecommunications problems. In 1991, he joined the faculty at U of T Engineering, where he was appointed the NSERC Research Chairholder in Enterprise Integration. And in 1994, Fox co-founded Novator Systems Ltd., one of the first companies to provide outsourced software and services for the then brand-new field of online retailing.

Fox’s more recent research has focused on developing ontologies — a shared vocabulary for systems to understand, communicate and reason about data — for enterprise modelling and applying them to Smart Cities. His ontologies for the representation of municipal information and knowledge have been adopted by cities around the world and have formed the basis of several ISO/IEC Smart City data standards. Fox co-initiated, with Professor Richard Florida, the creation of the School of Cities at U of T in 2015. That same year, he was named U of T Distinguished Professor of Urban Systems Engineering.

In 2014, Fox founded the Centre for Social Services Engineering, with a mandate to apply engineering principles to the design and delivery of social services to our society’s most vulnerable. To that end, he led the development of an ontology for impact measurement of social services: the Common Impact Data Standard (CIDS). Over 800 agencies across Canada are now using CIDS to report on their impact.

Fox is a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), as well as a past AAAI councilor and co-founder of the AAAI Special Interest Group in AI in Manufacturing. He was elected a fellow of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) in 2009 and garnered the EIC’s CP Rail Medal in 2011. In 2019, he was named a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

“Professor Fox’s groundbreaking research has advanced several applications in artificial intelligence, made our cities ‘smarter’ and more livable, and enhanced the ability of various agencies to deliver key social services,” says Chris Yip, Dean of the Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering.

“On behalf of the faculty, I congratulate him on this prestigious recognition and on his exceptional contributions.”