creators

Michael I. Jordan - machine learning and statistics

Michael I. Jordan is Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor Emeritus at UC Berkeley and Directeur de Recherche at Inria Paris; he won the 2020 von Neumann Medal.

Michael I. Jordan is an American computer scientist and statistician whose work joins statistics, optimization and computation. He took a bachelor's degree in psychology at Louisiana State University in 1978, a master's in mathematics and statistics at Arizona State University in 1980, and a PhD in cognitive science at UC San Diego in 1985 under David E. Rumelhart, then a postdoc with Andrew Barto at UMass Amherst. He taught in MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences from 1988 to 1998, then moved to UC Berkeley, where he was a professor until 2024 and has held the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professorship Emeritus in EECS and Statistics since. Since 2023 he has been Directeur de Recherche at Inria and the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, where he is listed on the Sierra project team. His own page also records him as Laureate Professor at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence and Honorary Professor at Peking University. His research covers graphical models, variational inference and the statistical foundations of machine learning, and he argues for economic and market-based framings of AI systems. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 and is also a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. His awards include the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies (2025), the inaugural World Laureates Association Prize in Computer Science or Mathematics (2022), the IEEE John von Neumann Medal (2020), the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence (2016) and the David E. Rumelhart Prize (2015).

Specialization

machine learning, statistical inference, optimization, AI and economics

Country

United States