Michael I. Jordan
Michael I. Jordan is an American computer scientist and statistician, a UC BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry professor emeritus and research director at Inria in France, known for work on statistical machine learning, variational inference and probabilistic graphical models; he won the inaugural WLA Prize and a BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.
Contents23 sections
Key facts
1956Born in Aberdeen, Maryland
Michael I. Jordan was born in 1956 in Aberdeen, Maryland, United States.[1]
He grew up in Louisiana and Kansas.[2]
1978–1980Training in Psychology and Statistics
He earned a BS in psychology at Louisiana State University and an MS in statistics at Arizona State University; visiting UC San Diego, he discovered the emerging field of cognitive science, an “aha” experience in his words.[2]
1985PhD in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego
He received a PhD in cognitive science from UC San Diego in 1985.[3]
1986–1988Postdoc at UMass Amherst
From 1986 to 1988 he was a postdoctoral researcher in computer and information science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.[4]
1988–1998MIT Faculty
From 1988 to 1998 he taught in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.[1]
1998Joins UC Berkeley
From 1998 he was a professor of EECS and statistics at UC Berkeley, chairing the statistics department from 2015 to 2017.[4]
2009Allen Newell Award
He received the ACMAustralian Community MediaAustralian Community Media (ACM) is an Australian regional and rural news publishing group with more than 100 brands, including The Canberra Times; in 2019 Nine sold it to a company controlled by interests associated with Antony Catalano and Thorney Investment Group.Open the full entry/AAAI Allen Newell Award in 2009.[3]
April 27, 2010Elected to the National Academy of Sciences
He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences; Berkeley described his research as lying at the intersection of computer science and biology, including machine learning.[5]
April 19, 2011Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
He was among three Berkeley faculty members in that year’s 212 new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.[6]
July 2014Wins the Rumelhart Prize
The Cognitive Science Society announced at its annual meeting in Quebec City that he had won the David E. Rumelhart Prize, which carries $100,000; he had been a student of David Rumelhart himself.[7]
2016Named “Most Influential Computer Scientist”
In 2016 he was identified as the “most influential computer scientist” based on an analysis of the published literature by the Semantic Scholar project.[8]
He has argued for zeroing in on small relevant subsets of big data, and with colleagues developed the “Bag of Little Bootstraps” to quickly estimate error bars for answers drawn from large databases.[9]
February 27, 2018Co-Leads RISELab Expedition
The National Science Foundation gave Berkeley’s RISELab a five-year, $10 million Expeditions in Computing award for real-time decision-making AI systems; the project was led by Ion Stoica, with him as one of the co-leads.[10]
July 1, 2019“Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet”
In the inaugural issue of the Harvard Data Science Review he published “Artificial Intelligence—The Revolution Hasn’t Happened Yet,” arguing that fascination with machine intelligence rivaling our own distracts us, and in a companion commentary stressed other forms of intelligence such as economic markets.[11]
2020IEEE John von Neumann Medal and Yale Honorary Degree
He received the IEEE John von Neumann Medal in 2020.[3]
That year Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry awarded him an honorary Doctor of Engineering and Technology degree.[2]
February 24, 2020Appears on the Lex Fridman Podcast
He appeared on episode 74 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing the term “artificial intelligence,” his disagreement with Yann LeCun, recommender systems and distributed decision-making at scale, privacy and trust, optimization and Nesterov acceleration, and the nature of statistics.[12]
May 6, 2021Elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society
He was one of 10 foreign members elected to the Royal Society that year, cited for his work on statistical inference and continuous optimization.[13]
That year he also won the American Mathematical Society’s Ulf Grenander Prize.[4]
2022Inaugural WLA Prize
He won the inaugural World Laureates Association Prize in Computer Science or Mathematics, worth RMB 10 million ($1.4 million), for fundamental contributions to the foundations of machine learning and its application; he was then director of Berkeley’s CLIMB center.[14]
November 9, 2023Prediction-Powered Inference
He and Berkeley colleagues published a paper in Science introducing prediction-powered inference, which uses a small amount of real data to correct predictions from large models such as AlphaFold so they can be used safely to test scientific hypotheses.[15]
July 1, 2024Leads Inria’s Markets and Learning Chair
Fondation Inria launched the “Marchés et Apprentissage” (Markets and Learning) research chair with him as scientific lead, backed by Air Liquide, BNP ParibasBNP ParibasBNP Paribas is a banking and financial services group headquartered in Paris, France. It was formed by the 2000 merger of BNP and Paribas, with predecessor institutions dating to the nineteenth century. The group provides corporate and institutional banking, commercial and personal banking, investment management and insurance, with major commercial banking networks in France, Belgium, Italy and Luxembourg.Open the full entry Asset Management, EDF, Orange and SNCF, to build economic incentives into AI models.[16]
January 21, 2025BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award
He and Anil Jain shared the 17th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies; the committee said his work provided unified algorithms for statistical and probabilistic inference.[17]
The BBVA Foundation said that in the 2000s he devised algorithms to run machine learning programs on hundreds or thousands of computers, leading to the creation of the Ray platform.[1]
As of October 2026: Inria and Berkeley Emeritus
He is a research director at Inria and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, has been a distinguished professor emeritus at UC Berkeley since 2024, and has been a laureate professor at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence since 2020.[18]
He and his wife, Barbara Rosario, have two sons.[2]
Related Organizations, Websites, and Public Accounts
Personal website: Public link: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~jordan/ (opens in a new window)[18]
UC Berkeley: Official website: https://www.berkeley.edu/ (opens in a new window)[19]
Inria: Official website: https://www.inria.fr/en (opens in a new window)[20]
Sources
- Michael I. Jordan, 17th Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Information and Communication Technologies (opens in a new window)
- Michael I. Jordan (opens in a new window)
- Michael Jordan | EECS at UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Vitae (opens in a new window)
- Three UC Berkeley Professors Named to National Academy of Sciences | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Three Faculty Members Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Michael Jordan Of Cognitive Science Wins The Rumelhart Prize : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR (opens in a new window)
- Michael I. Jordan | USENIX (opens in a new window)
- Big Thinking About Big Data | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- $10 Million for Berkeley RISELab’s AI Research | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Prof. Michael Jordan Lays Out Broader Agenda for AI | CDSS at UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- #74 - Michael I. Jordan: Machine Learning, Recommender Systems, and the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast (opens in a new window)
- EECS Professor Michael Jordan Named to Royal Society | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- EECS and Statistics Prof. Michael I. Jordan wins the inaugural World Laureates Association Prize | Department of Statistics (opens in a new window)
- How to Use AI for Discovery — Without Leading Science Astray | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Intégrer les incitations économiques dans les modèles d’IA : cinq grandes entreprises françaises s’allient à la Fondation Inria pour lancer la Chaire Marchés et Apprentissage | Fondation Inria (opens in a new window)
- Michael I. Jordan Receives Frontiers of Knowledge Award | Research UC Berkeley (opens in a new window)
- Michael I. Jordan's Home Page (opens in a new window)
- University of California, Berkeley: Home (opens in a new window)
- Accueil | Inria (opens in a new window)