Profile of Michael I. Jordan

摘要

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.