Tom Mitchell Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

Tom Mitchell , the Fredkin University Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), joining the world's most accomplished scholars, scientists, writers, artists and civic leaders. Mitchell founded the world's first Machine Learning Department at CMU's School of Computer Science in 2006 and led the department until earlier this year. His research focuses on statistical learning algorithms for understanding natural language text and on understanding how the human brain represents information. His work has been featured in The New York Times and on CBS's "60 Minutes. A former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), Mitchell is a fellow of both the AAAI and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Other members of this year's class include neuroscientist John Rubenstein, cognitive learning scientist Michelene Chi, professor and autism spokesperson Temple Grandin, jazz composer and musician Wayne Shorter and former Time managing editor Walter Isaacson. The full list of the 213 new members is online at www.amacad.org/members.