Michael Irwin Jordan (born February 25, 1956) is an American scientist, professor at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

and researcher 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 ...

, 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 r ...

. Jordan was elected a member of the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

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 Science is a systematic endeavor that Scientific method, builds and organizes knowledge in the form of Testability, testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earli ...

'' 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 Louisiana State University (officially Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as LSU) is a public land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The university was founded in 1860 nea ...

, 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 Connectionism refers to both an approach in the field of cognitive science that hopes to explain mental phenomena using artificial neural networks (ANN) and to a wide range of techniques and algorithms using ANNs in the context of artificial int ...

(PDP) Group in the 1980s.

Career and research

Jordan is currently the Pehong Chen Distinguished

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an academic rank at universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who professes". Professors ...

at the

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 A recurrent neural network (RNN) is a class of artificial neural networks where connections between nodes can create a cycle, allowing output from some nodes to affect subsequent input to the same nodes. This allows it to exhibit temporal dynamic ...

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). Bay ...

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 The calculus of variations (or Variational Calculus) is a field of mathematical analysis that uses variations, which are small changes in functions and functionals, to find maxima and minima of functionals: mappings from a set of functions t ...

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 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 ...

''. 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 The ''Journal of Machine Learning Research'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering machine learning. It was established in 2000 and the first editor-in-chief was Leslie Kaelbling. The current editors-in-chief are Francis Ba ...

'', which was created by Leslie Kaelbling 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 artifici ...

2004), a best paper award (with R. Jacobs) at the American Control Conference (ACC 1991), the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award, the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operat ...

Neural Networks Pioneer Award, and an

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

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 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 ar ...

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 pr ...

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 distinguished ...

"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 ...

, a member of the

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 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 practical disciplines (includi ...

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