Photo: Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons¹⁶

Thomas G. Dietterich

American computer scientist and academic

Thomas G. Dietterich is emeritus professor of computer science at Oregon State University. He is one of the pioneers of the field of machine learning.²

From Wikipedia’s article on Thomas G. Dietterich (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born 1954.¹

About

He served as executive editor of Machine Learning (journal) (1992–98) and helped co-found the Journal of Machine Learning Research. In response to the media's attention on the dangers of artificial intelligence, Dietterich has been quoted for an academic perspective to a broad range of media outlets including National Public Radio, Business Insider, Microsoft Research, CNET, and The Wall Street Journal.

Among his research contributions were the invention of error-correcting output coding to multi-class classification, the formalization of the multiple-instance problem, the MAXQ framework for hierarchical reinforcement learning, and the development of methods for integrating non-parametric regression trees into probabilistic graphical models.

From Wikipedia’s article on Thomas G. Dietterich, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.²

Companies

Association for the Advancement of Artificial IntelligenceChair 2014 to 2016¹⁵

Early life and education

Date not recordedOberlin College^{3 4}
Date not recordedUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign^{3 4}
Date not recordedStanford University^{3 4}

Biography and education

Thomas Dietterich was born in South Weymouth, Massachusetts, in 1954. His family later moved to New Jersey and then again to Illinois, where Tom graduated from Naperville Central High School. Dietterich then entered Oberlin College and began his undergraduate studies. In 1977, Dietterich graduated from Oberlin with a degree in mathematics, focusing on probability and statistics.

Dietterich spent the following two years at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. After those two years, he began his doctoral studies in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University. Dietterich received his Ph.D. in 1984 and moved to Corvallis, Oregon, where he was hired as an assistant professor in computer science. in 2013, he was named "Distinguished Professor". In 2016, Dietterich retired from his position at Oregon State University.

Throughout his career, Dietterich has worked to promote scientific publication and conference presentations. For many years, he was the editor of the MIT Press series on Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning. He also held the position of co-editor of the Morgan Claypool Synthesis Series on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He has organized several conferences and workshops including serving as Technical Program Co-Chair of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), Technical Program Chair of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS-2000) and General Chair of NIPS-2001. He served as founding President of the International Machine Learning Society and he has been a member of the IMLS Board since its founding. He is currently also a member of the Steering Committee of the Asian Conference on Machine Learning.

Dangers of AI: an academic perspective

Dietterich has argued that the most realistic risks about the dangers of artificial intelligence are basic mistakes, breakdowns and cyberattacks, and the fact that it simply may not always work, rather than machines that become super powerful or destroy the human race. Dietterich considers machines becoming self-aware and trying to exterminate humans to be more science fiction than scientific fact. But to the extent that computer systems are given increasingly dangerous tasks, and asked to learn from and interpret their experiences, he said they may simply make mistakes. Instead, much of the work done in the AI safety community does indeed focus around accidents and design flaws.

From Wikipedia’s article on Thomas G. Dietterich (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: university teacher, computer scientist.⁸

2014 to 2016Chair, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence⁷
1985 to 2016Worked at Oregon State University^{5 6}

Personal life

Born1954, Weymouth⁹
CitizenshipUnited States¹⁰

Awards

2007Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science^{4 11}
2002ACM Fellow^{11 13}
1994AAAI Fellow^{11 12}

Sources

The numbers on this page point here. Each one links to the record it came from.

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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich on Wikidata
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WikipediaThomas G. Dietterich on Wikipedia
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: education, on Wikidata
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Wikidataeducation, as reported
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: Worked at Oregon State University, on Wikidata
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WikidataWorked at Oregon State University, as reported
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: Chair, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, on Wikidata
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: occupation, on Wikidata
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: place of birth, on Wikidata
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: citizenship, on Wikidata
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: award, on Wikidata
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Wikidataaward, as reported
13
Wikidataaward, as reported
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WikidataThomas G. Dietterich: X, on Wikidata
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WikidataAssociation for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, Chair
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Wikimedia CommonsThomas G. Dietterich photo by Oregon State University, CC BY-SA 2.0