Michael I. Jordan is the Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor in the 
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the 
Department of Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley.  
He received his Masters in Mathematics from Arizona State University, 
and earned his PhD in Cognitive Science in 1985 from the University of 
California, San Diego.  He was a professor at MIT from 1988 to 1998. 
His research in recent years has focused on Bayesian nonparametric 
analysis, probabilistic graphical models, spectral methods, variational
methods, kernel machines and applications to problems in statistical 
genetics, signal processing, computational biology, information retrieval 
and natural language processing.  Prof. Jordan is a member of the National 
Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering
and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He is a 
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  
He has been named a Neyman Lecturer and a Medallion Lecturer by the 
Institute of Mathematical Statistics.  He is an Elected Member of the
International Institute of Statistics.  He is a Fellow of the AAAI, 
ACM, ASA, CSS, IMS, IEEE and SIAM.