Michael I. Jordan is a leading researcher in machine learning

Machine learning

Machine learning, a branch of artificial intelligence, is a scientific discipline concerned with the design and development of algorithms that allow computers to evolve behaviors based on empirical data, such as from sensor data or databases...

 and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

. Jordan was a prime mover behind popularising Bayesian network

Bayesian network

A Bayesian network, Bayes network, belief network or directed acyclic graphical model is a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of random variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph . For example, a Bayesian network could represent the probabilistic...

s in the machine learning community and is known for pointing out links between machine learning and statistics

Statistics

Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....

. Jordan was also prominent in the formalisation of variational methods

Variational Bayes

Variational Bayesian methods, also called ensemble learning, are a family of techniques for approximating intractable integrals arising in Bayesian inference and machine learning...

 for approximate inference and the popularisation of the expectation-maximization algorithm

Expectation-maximization algorithm

In statistics, an expectation–maximization algorithm is an iterative method for finding maximum likelihood or maximum a posteriori estimates of parameters in statistical models, where the model depends on unobserved latent variables...

 in machine learning.

Jordan was a student of David E. Rumelhart and a member of the PDP Group at the University of California, San Diego

University of California, San Diego

The University of California, San Diego, commonly known as UCSD or UC San Diego, is a public research university located in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego, California, United States...

 in the 1980s. During this time he developed recurrent neural networks as a cognitive model. In recent years, though, his work is less driven from a cognitive perspective and more from the background of traditional statistics.

Jordan is currently a full professor

Professor

A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...

 at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 where his appointment is split across the Department of Statistics and the Department of EECS.

Jordan received numerous awards, including a best paper award (with X. Nguyen and M. Wainwright) at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML

ICML

The International Conference on Machine Learning is the leading international academic conference in machine learning, attracting annually about 500 participants from all over the world...

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

Allen Newell

Allen Newell was a researcher in computer science and cognitive psychology at the RAND corporation and at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, Tepper School of Business, and Department of Psychology...

 Award, the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, and an NSF

NSF

-Politics:* National Service Framework, any of a series of British government policies on medical care* National Socialist Front, a Swedish Nazi party* NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party...

 Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 2010 he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

 "for contributions to the theory and application of machine learning."

It is notable that many of Jordan's graduate students and postdocs continue to strongly influence the machine learning field after their PhDs. Zoubin Ghahramani

Zoubin Ghahramani

Zoubin Ghahramani is a researcher in the area of Bayesian statistics and machine learning. He has made significant contributions in the areas of Bayesian machine learning , as well as graphical models and computational neuroscience...

, Tommi Jaakkola, Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng

Andrew Ng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. His work is primarily in machine learning and robotics. He received his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and finished his postdoctoral research in the University of California, Berkeley, where he...

, Lawrence Saul and David Blei

David Blei

David Blei is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Princeton University. His work is primarily in machine learning.His research interests include topic models and he was one of the original developers of latent Dirichlet allocation....

(all former students or postdocs of Jordan) have all continued to make significant contributions to the field.

External links

• Homepage (at University of California, Berkeley)
• Published papers (chronological)