Michael Jordan wins 2020 IEEE John von Neumann Medal

CS Prof. Michael I. Jordan has won the prestigious John von Neumann Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).  The award was established in 1990 to acknowledge “outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology.”    Jordan, who was ranked as the world’s most influential computer scientist in 2016 by Science magazine, was cited for “For contributions to machine learning and data science.”  Jordan began developing recurrent neural networks as a cognitive model in the 1980s, was prominent in the formalisation of variational methods for approximate inference, and popularised both the expectation-maximization algorithm and Bayesian networks among the machine learning community.  Jordan is the fifth Berkeley CS faculty member to win this award.