Michael Irwin Jordan (born February 25, 1956) is an American scientist, professor at the
University of California, Berkeley and researcher in
machine learning,
statistics, and
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech re ...
.
Jordan was elected a member of the
National Academy of Engineering in 2010 for contributions to the foundations and applications of machine learning.
He is one of the leading figures in machine learning, and in 2016 ''
Science'' reported him as the world's most influential computer scientist.
Education
Jordan received his BS magna cum laude in Psychology in 1978 from the
Louisiana State University, his MS in Mathematics in 1980 from Arizona State University and his PhD in Cognitive Science in 1985 from the University of California, San Diego.
At the University of California, San Diego, Jordan was a student of
David Rumelhart
David Everett Rumelhart (June 12, 1942 – March 13, 2011) was an American psychologist who made many contributions to the formal analysis of human cognition, working primarily within the frameworks of mathematical psychology, symbolic artif ...
and a member of the
Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) Group in the 1980s.
Career and research
Jordan is currently the Pehong Chen Distinguished
Professor
Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...
at the
University of California, Berkeley where his appointment is split across EECS and Statistics. He was a professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at
MIT
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
from 1988 to 1998.
[
In the 1980s Jordan started developing recurrent neural networks as a cognitive model. In recent years, his work is less driven from a cognitive perspective and more from the background of traditional statistics.
Jordan popularised ]Bayesian network
A Bayesian network (also known as a Bayes network, Bayes net, belief network, or decision network) is a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Ba ...
s in the machine learning community and is known for pointing out links between machine learning and statistics. He was also prominent in the formalisation of variational methods for approximate inference and the popularisation of the expectation-maximization algorithm in machine learning.
Resignation from ''Machine Learning''
In 2001, Jordan and others resigned from the editorial board of the journal '' Machine Learning''. In a public letter, they argued for less restrictive access and pledged support for a new open access journal, the '' Journal of Machine Learning Research'', which was created by Leslie Kaelbling
Leslie Pack Kaelbling is an American roboticist and the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is widely recognized for adapting partially observable Markov decision process from ...
to support the evolution of the field of machine learning.
Honors and awards
Jordan has received numerous awards, including a best student paper award (with X. Nguyen and M. Wainwright) at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML
The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) is the leading international academic conference in machine learning. Along with NeurIPS and ICLR, it is one of the three primary conferences of high impact in machine learning and artificia ...
2004), a best paper award (with R. Jacobs) at the American Control Conference (ACC 1991), the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 2002 he was named an AAAI Fellow
Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...
"for significant contributions to reasoning under uncertainty, machine learning, and human motor control." In 2004 he was named an IMS Ims is a Norwegian surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Gry Tofte Ims (born 1986), Norwegian footballer
* Rolf Anker Ims (born 1958), Norwegian ecologist
See also
* IMS (disambiguation) Ims is a Norwegian surname. Notable people wit ...
Fellow "for contributions to graphical models and machine learning." In 2005 he was named an IEEE Fellow
As of 2019, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has 5,082 members designated Fellow, each of whom is associated with one of the 41 societies under the IEEE. The Fellow grade of membership is the highest level of membershi ...
"for contributions to probabilistic graphical models and neural information processing systems." In 2007 he was named an ASA
ASA as an abbreviation or initialism may refer to:
Biology and medicine
* Accessible surface area of a biomolecule, accessible to a solvent
* Acetylsalicylic acid, aspirin
* Advanced surface ablation, refractive eye surgery
* Anterior spinal a ...
Fellow. In 2010 he was named a Cognitive Science Society
The Cognitive Science Society is a professional society for the interdisciplinary field of cognitive science. It brings together researchers from many fields who hold the common goal of understanding the nature of the human mind. The society p ...
Fellow[ and named an ]ACM Fellow
ACM or A.C.M. may refer to:
Aviation
* AGM-129 ACM, 1990–2012 USAF cruise missile
* Air chief marshal
* Air combat manoeuvring or dogfighting
* Air cycle machine
* Arica Airport (Colombia) (IATA: ACM), in Arica, Amazonas, Colombia
Computing
...
"for contributions to the theory and application of machine learning." In 2012 he was named a SIAM Fellow
The SIAM Fellowship is an award and fellowship that recognizes outstanding members of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The goal of the program is to:
*honor SIAM members who are recognized by their peers as distinguishe ...
"for contributions to machine learning, in particular variational approaches to statistical inference." In 2014 he was named an International Society for Bayesian Analysis
The International Society for Bayesian Analysis (ISBA) is a society with the goal of promoting Bayesian analysis for solving problems in the sciences and government. It was formally incorporated as a not for profit corporation by economist Arnold ...
Fellow "for his outstanding research contributions at the interface of statistics, computer sciences and probability, for his leading role in promoting Bayesian methods in machine learning, engineering and other fields, and for his extensive service to ISBA in many roles."
Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences
Membership of the National Academy of Sciences is an award granted to scientists that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of the United States judges to have made “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research”. Membership i ...
, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He received the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015 and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. He also won 2020 IEEE John von Neumann Medal.
In 2016, Jordan was identified as the "most influential computer scientist", based on an analysis of the published literature by the Semantic Scholar project.
In 2019, Jordan argued that the artificial intelligence revolution hasn't happened yet and that the AI revolution required a blending of computer science with statistics.["Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet." https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/wot7mkc1/release/9. Retrieved 29 November 2021]
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Jordan, Michael I.
1956 births
Living people
Artificial intelligence researchers
Machine learning researchers
University of California, San Diego alumni
Fellows of the American Statistical Association
Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence
UC Berkeley College of Engineering faculty
Place of birth missing (living people)
Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Rumelhart Prize laureates
Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society