Michael Lederman Littman (born August 30, 1966) is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

, researcher, educator, and author. His research interests focus on reinforcement learning. He is currently a University Professor of Computer Science at

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

, where he has taught since 2012.

Career

Before graduate school, Littman worked with

Thomas Landauer Dr. Thomas K. Landauer (April 25, 1932 – March 26, 2014) was a Professor Emeritus at the Department of Psychology of the University of Colorado. He received his doctorate in 1960 from Harvard University, and also held academic appointments at Harv ...

at Bellcore and was granted a patent for one of the earliest systems for

cross-language information retrieval Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is a subfield of information retrieval dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user's query. The term "cross-language information retrieval" has many ...

. Littman received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

from

in 1996. From 1996 to 1999, he was a professor at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. During his time at Duke, he worked on an automated crossword solver PROVERB, which won an Outstanding Paper Award in 1999 from AAAI and competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. From 2000 to 2002, he worked at

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

. From 2002 to 2012, he was a professor at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

; he chaired the department from 2009-12. In Summer 2012 he returned to

as a full professor. He has also taught at

Georgia Institute of Technology The Georgia Institute of Technology, commonly referred to as Georgia Tech or, in the state of Georgia, as Tech or The Institute, is a public research university and institute of technology in Atlanta, Georgia. Established in 1885, it is part of ...

, where he was listed as an adjunct professor. Littman is currently on rotation from Brown University as a Division Director at the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

Research

Littman's research interests are varied but have focused mostly on reinforcement learning and related fields, particularly, in

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

more generally,

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents. Myerson, Roger B. (1991). ''Game Theory: Analysis of Conflict,'' Harvard University Press, p.&nbs1 Chapter-preview links, ppvii–xi It has appli ...

, computer networking, partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He is also interested in computing education more broadly and has authored a book on programming for everyone.

Awards

* Elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions to the design and analysis of sequential decision-making algorithms in artificial intelligence". * Winner of th
IFAAMAS Influential Paper Award
(2014) * * Winner of the AAAI “Shakey” Award fo
Overfitting: Machine Learning Music Video
(2014) * * Elected as a AAAI Fellow in 2010 for "significant contributions to the fields of reinforcement learning, decision making under uncertainty, and statistical language applications". * * Winner of the AAAI �
Shakey
�� Award for Short Video fo
Aibo Ingenuity
(2007) * * Winner of th
Warren I. Susman Award for Excellence in Teaching
at Rutgers (2011) * * Winner of th
Robert B. Cox Award
at Duke (1999) * * Winner of th
AAAI Outstanding Paper Award
(1999)

References

Bibliography

* * * *

External links

*
Michael Littman's Homepage

YouTube page

Music Videos

Press references

Smart Home Programming: If-Then Statements Make A Comeback
Science 2.0

New York Times
Many Scientists Dismiss the Fear of Robots
Fortune
Celebrating the 20th Anniversary of MIME Email Attachments
NJ Tech Weekly
Humans Beat Poker Bot… Barely
-NBC News

* ttp://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/going-cruciverbalistic Going Cruciverbalistic American Scientist

Udacity Courses

Intro to Algorithms
(over 88k student signups)
Machine Learning
(over 83k student signups)
Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making
{{DEFAULTSORT:Littman, Michael L. Living people American computer scientists Machine learning researchers Brown University alumni Duke University faculty Rutgers University faculty Brown University faculty 1966 births Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2018 Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Yale University alumni