Michael I. Jordan

In 2016, Jordan was identified as the "most influential computer scientist", based on an analysis of the published literature by the Semantic Scholar project.

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.

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 2004), a best paper award (with R. Jacobs) at the American Control Conference (ACC 1991), the ACM - AAAI Allen Newell Award, the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award, and an NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 2010 he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery "for contributions to the theory and application of machine learning."

In 2001, Jordan and others resigned from the editorial board of the journal Machine Learning. 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, which was created by Leslie Kaelbling to support the evolution of the field of machine learning.

Jordan is currently a full professor at the University of California, Berkeley where his appointment is split across the Department of Statistics and the Department of EECS. He was a professor at the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT from 1988 to 1998.

In the 1980s Jordan started developing recurrent neural networks 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 received his BS magna cum laude in Psychology in 1978 from the Louisiana State University, 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 and a member of the PDP Group in the 1980s.

Michael Irwin Jordan (born February 25, 1956) is an American scientist, professor at the University of California, Berkeley and researcher in machine learning, statistics, and artificial intelligence. He is one of the leading figures in machine learning, and in 2016 Science reported him as the world's most influential computer scientist.