Profile of Michael I. Jordan

Abstract

The multidisciplinary work of Michael I. Jordan, a recently elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, is perhaps best introduced by what he calls one of the most fascinating intellectual questions of all time: How does a person reason and make decisions in environments that are uncertain? “Humans are in a world where most of the entities that they care about are not ever explained to them,” says Jordan, professor of Statistics and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley. “The world is composed of a sensory stream and somehow we have to figure out what parts of that sensory stream are important, what parts have semantic relevance, and what parts relate to our goals and our needs. Even if we learn all about language and we learn about the meanings of words and are able to perceive and manipulate objects in the world, we still are uncertain,” Jordan says. Michael I. Jordan. That uncertainty arises in part because humans have only a partial knowledge about the world and are ignorant of many influential factors operating behind the scenes, but also because the world is inherently stochastic. “How does an intelligent entity cope with the vast amount of uncertainty around him or her?” Jordan wonders. “And how can we understand that, how can we make it better, to improve our lot in life?” To explore these questions, Jordan has embarked on an intellectual odyssey that has taken him across the far reaches several fields, including psychology, statistics, cognitive science, computer science, and engineering. His work has helped to forge new links between these fields, and has provided a deeper understanding of the relationships among learning, inference, induction, and reasoning. A late baby boomer child of the 1960s, …