Pedro Domingos

Domingos studied electrical engineering and computer science at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, earning a five-year Licenciatura in 1988 and a master’s degree in the same field in 1992 with a thesis titled Competitive Recall: A Memory Model for Real-Time Reasoning.⁠[1]

While studying, he was an intern and then a researcher at INESC in Lisbon from 1986 to 1989, first in the digital signal processing and speech recognition group and then in the computer graphics group; from 1987 to 1992 he was a teaching and research assistant at Instituto Superior Técnico; and from 1990 to 1992 he wrote a regular column on the future of music technology for the Portuguese magazine Music, Instruments and Technology.⁠[1]

From 1992 to 1997 he held a Fulbright Scholarship for graduate study in the United States. At the University of California, Irvine he earned a master’s degree in information and computer science in 1994 and a Ph.D. in 1997, with a dissertation titled A Unified Approach to Concept Learning, advised by Dennis Kibler.⁠[1]

After completing his doctorate, Domingos returned to Instituto Superior Técnico as an assistant professor from 1997 to 1999, teaching courses including machine learning and natural language processing.⁠[1]

In 1999 Domingos joined the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, serving as assistant professor from 1999 to 2004, associate professor from 2004 to 2012 and professor from 2012 to 2020. During this period he was a visiting associate professor at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry in 2005–06 and at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon UniversityCarnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It grew out of the Carnegie Technical Schools, founded with funding from Andrew Carnegie in 1900, which were renamed the Carnegie Institute of Technology in 1912 and took the present name after merging with the Mellon Institute in 1967. The university is known for computer science, robotics, engineering, and the arts, and has campuses in Qatar, Silicon Valley, and Rwanda. As of September 2025, it enrolled 16,582 students. Its current president is Farnam Jahanian. On September 30, 2026, the university announced a $3 billion gift from Ken Griffin and plans to build a new campus in Miami.Open the full entry in 2008–09, and a visiting scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2012–13.⁠[1]

His research covers machine learning and data mining; he helped start the fields of statistical relational AI, data stream mining, adversarial learning, machine learning for information integration and influence maximization in social networks, and he has authored or co-authored more than 200 technical publications.⁠[2]

His homepage lists software projects tied to this research, including the statistical relational AI system Alchemy, the sum-product networks project SPN, and VFML for mining massive data sources.⁠[3]

In 2009 Morgan & Claypool published Markov Logic: An Interface Layer for Artificial Intelligence, which he co-wrote with Daniel Lowd.⁠[1]

He was a founding board member of the International Machine Learning Society from 2001 to 2006 and served on its board again from 2013 to 2018; he has been on the editorial board of the journal Machine Learning since 2001, and he was program co-chair of KDD-2003 and SRL-2009.⁠[1][2]

On September 22, 2015, Basic Books published Domingos’s popular science book The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World, a 352-page work. The book explains machine learning and the effort to build a universal learning algorithm that can discover knowledge from data, looks at the learning systems behind search engines, online retail platforms and smartphones, and discusses what such an algorithm could mean for business, science and society.⁠[4]

In 2016 the book was named an Amazon Editors’ Pick for Best Nonfiction.⁠[1]

In a March 2017 interview with the Portuguese magazine Visão, Domingos said the real risk is not that computers become too intelligent but that they are too stupid and have already taken over the world. He also said he does not know Bill GatesBill GatesBill Gates is an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who cofounded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975 and served as its chief executive and chairman. He later shifted his focus toward global health, education and climate, chairs the Gates Foundation, and manages investments through arrangements including Cascade.Open the full entry personally, having crossed paths with him only a few times, and that The Master Algorithm was recommended to Gates by one of Microsoft’s directors.⁠[5]

On August 16, 2018, the investment firm D. E. Shaw announced that it had hired Domingos as a managing director to lead its new, independent Machine Learning Research Group, reporting to Cedomir Crnkovic. Domingos said at the time: “Financial data sets are among the most challenging and fascinating ones for machine learning.”⁠[6]

He served as head of machine learning research at D. E. Shaw until 2019.⁠[1]

Since 2020 Domingos has been a professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s Paul G. AllenPaul AllenPaul Allen (1953–2018) was an American entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975. After leaving Microsoft’s management in 1983 he founded the investment and project-management firm Vulcan, owned the NFL’s Seattle Seahawks and the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, funded private spaceflight projects including SpaceShipOne and Stratolaunch, and created institutions such as the Allen Institute for Brain Science and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, giving more than $2.65 billion to philanthropy during his life.Open the full entry School of Computer Science & Engineering. That year he contributed to the ISAT study on DARPA’s Third Wave of AI.⁠[1][2]

On August 20, 2024, Domingos’s satirical novel 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire was published through BookBaby in 226 pages. Set during the 2040 U.S. presidential election, it pits PresiBot, an AI candidate built by the startup KumbAI, against Democrat John Raging Bull, a Lakota chief; the plot follows KumbAI’s CEO and CTO, the emotion-controlling tech company Happinet, and PresiBot’s technical malfunctions.⁠[7]

On September 1, 2024, theoretical computer scientist Scott AaronsonScott AaronsonScott Aaronson is an American theoretical computer scientist, professor of computer science at UT Austin and director of its Quantum Information Center, who works on quantum computing and computational complexity theory, co-proposed the BosonSampling model, received the ACM Prize in Computing, and worked on AI safety at OpenAI from 2022 to 2024.Open the full entry reviewed the book on his blog, describing it as likely Domingos’s first novel and noting that Happinet parodies GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry and/or MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry.⁠[8]

On September 30, 2024, Domingos discussed 2040 and AI’s impact on politics and society on the Eye on AI podcast, presenting AI mainly as a tool that amplifies human intelligence rather than as an existential threat.⁠[9]

Domingos received an NSF CAREER Award in 2000, a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2003, 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 SIGKDD Innovation Award in 2014, the KDD Test of Time Award in 2015, the Nvidia Pioneer Award in 2018 and the IJCAI John McCarthy Award in 2019; he was a Kavli Frontiers Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2007, became a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 2010 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2020. In 2017 he was named a Counselor of Portugal in the World.⁠[1]

He has written for publications including The Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street JournalThe Wall Street Journal is a U.S. news publication founded in 1889, with a focus on business, finance and economics. It is published by Dow Jones, part of News Corp.Open the full entry, Scientific American and Wired.⁠[2]

Personal website: https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~pedrod/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

X: Public account: https://x.com/pmddomingos (opens in a new window).⁠[3]