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Michael I. Jordan    

Statistics Professor at UC Berkeley, Scientist, and Machine Learning Researcher

Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive, biological and social sciences. Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2016, Prof. Jordan was named the "most influential computer scientist" worldwide in an article in Science, based on rankings from the Semantic Scholar search engine.

Jordan was the inaugural winner of the World Laureates Association (WLA) Prize in 2022. He received the Ulf Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society in 2021, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2020, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award in 2016, the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2015, and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009. He gave the Inaugural IMS Grace Wahba Lecture in 2022, the IMS Neyman Lecture in 2011, and an IMS Medallion Lecture in 2004. He was a Plenary Lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018.

He received his Masters in Mathematics from Arizona State University, and earned his PhD in Cognitive Science in 1985 from the University of California, San Diego. He was a professor at MIT from 1988 to 1998.

Speech Topics


How AI Fails Us, and How Economics Can Help

Artificial intelligence (AI) has focused on a paradigm in which intelligence inheres in a single, autonomous agent. Social issues are entirely secondary in this paradigm. When AI systems are rolled out in social contexts, however, the overall design of such systems is often naive--a centralized entity provides services to passive agents and reaps the rewards. Such a paradigm need not be the dominant paradigm for information technology. In a broader framing, intelligence inheres as much in the overall system as it does in individual agents, be they humans or computers. This is a perspective that is familiar in the social sciences, and a key theme of Michael I. Jordan's talk is that of bringing economics perspectives into contact with computer science perspectives. He also digs into the implications for business models based on AI.

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