Thomas G. Dietterich

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. 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, In 2016, Dietterich retired from his position at Oregon State University. 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.

Research interests

Professor Dietterich is interested in all aspects of machine learning. There are three major strands of his research. First, he is interested in the fundamental questions of artificial intelligence and how machine learning can provide the basis for building integrated intelligent systems. Second, he is interested in ways that people and computers can collaborate to solve challenging problems. And third, he is interested in applying machine learning to problems in the ecological sciences and ecosystem management as part of the emerging field of computational sustainability.

Over his career, he has worked on a wide variety of problems ranging from drug design to user interfaces to computer security. His current focus is on ways that computer science methods can help advance ecological science and improve our management of the Earth's ecosystems. This passion has led to several projects including research in wildfire management, invasive vegetation and understanding the distribution and migration of birds. For example, Dietterich's research is helping scientists at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology answer questions like: How do birds decide to migrate north? How do they know when to land and stopover for a few days? How do they choose where to make a nest? Tens of thousands of volunteer birdwatchers (citizen scientists) all over the world contribute data to the study by submitting their bird sightings to the eBird website. The amount of data is overwhelming – in March 2012 they had over 3.1 million bird observations. Machine learning can uncover patterns in data to model the migration of species. But there are many other applications for the same techniques which will allow organizations to better manage our forests, oceans, and endangered species, as well as improve traffic flow, water systems, the electrical power grid, and more.

I realized I wanted to have an impact on something that really mattered – and certainly the whole Earth's ecosystem, of which we are a part, is under threat in so many ways. And so if there's some way that I can use my technical skills to improve both the science base and the tools needed for policy and management decisions, then I would like to do that. I am passionate about that. 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.

Positions held 2014–2016: President, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). 2013–present: Distinguished Professor of computer science, Oregon State University. 2005–present: Director of Intelligent Systems Research, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University. 2006–2008: Chief Scientist, Smart Desktop, Inc., Seattle, WA. 2004–2005: Chief Scientist, MyStrands, Inc., Corvallis, OR. 1995-2013: Professor of computer science, Oregon State University. 1998–1999: Visiting Senior Scientist, Institute for the Investigation of Artificial Intelligence, Barcelona, Spain. (Sabbatical leave position) 1985–1988: Assistant Professor of computer science, Oregon State University. 1979–1984: Research Assistant, Heuristic Programming Project, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University. 1979 (Summer): Member of Technical Staff, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Naperville, Illinois. Computer-to-computer file transfer and micro-code distribution to remote switching systems. 1977 (Summer): Assistant to the Director of Planning and Research, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. Developed institutional planning database.

Awards and honors

Thomas Dietterich was honored by Oregon State University in the spring of 2013 as a "Distinguished Professor" for his work as a pioneer in the field of machine learning and being one of the mostly highly cited scientists in his field.

His other awards and honors include:

ACM Distinguished Lecturer, 2012-2013 Oregon State University, College of Engineering Collaboration Award, 2004 Winner, JAIR Award for Best Paper in Previous Five Years, 2003 Fellow, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, elected 1994 NSF Presidential Young Investigator, 1987-92

Selected publications Liping Liu, Thomas G. Dietterich, Nan Li, Zhi-Hua Zhou (2016). Transductive Optimization of Top k Precision. International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2016). pp. 1781–1787. New York, NY Md. Amran Siddiqui, Alan Fern, Thomas G. Dietterich, Shubhomoy Das (2016). Finite Sample Complexity of Rare Pattern Anomaly Detection. Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2016). New York, NY Alkaee-Taleghan, M., Hall, K., Crowley, M., Albers, H. J., Dietterich, T. G. (2015). PAC Optimal MDP Planning for Ecosystem Management. Journal of Machine Learning Research, 16, 3877-3903 Thomas Dietterich, Eric Horvitz (2015). Viewpoint: Rise of Concerns about AI: Reflections and Directions. Communications of the ACM, 58(10) 38-40 Dietterich, T. G. (2009). Machine Learning in Ecosystem Informatics and Sustainability. Abstract of Invited Talk. Proceedings of the 2009 International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2009). Pasadena, CA Dietterich, T. G., Bao, X., Keiser, V., Shen, J. (2010). Machine Learning Methods for High Level Cyber Situation Awareness. pp. 227–247 in Jajodia, S., Liu, P., Swarup, V., Wang, C. (Eds.) Cyber Situational Awareness, Springer. Dietterich, T. G., Domingos, P., Getoor, L., Muggleton, S. Tadepalli, P. (2008). Structured machine learning: the next ten years. Machine Learning. 73(1) 3-23. DOI: 10.1007/s10994-008-5079-1 Dietterich, T. G., Bao, X. (2008). Integrating Multiple Learning Components Through Markov Logic. Twenty-Third Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2008). 622-627 Dietterich, T. G. (2007). Machine Learning in Ecosystem Informatics. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Discovery Science. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence Volume 4755, Springer, Berlin Dietterich, T. G. Learning and Reasoning. Technical report, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Oregon State University. Dietterich, T. G. (2003). Machine Learning. In Nature Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, London: Macmillan, 2003. Dietterich, T. G. (2002). Machine Learning for Sequential Data: A Review. In T. Caelli (Ed.) Structural, Syntactic, and Statistical Pattern Recognition; Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 2396. (pp. 15–30). Springer-Verlag Dietterich, T. G. (2002). Ensemble Learning. In The Handbook of Brain Theory and Neural Networks, Second edition, (M.A. Arbib, Ed.), Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002. 405-408. Dietterich, T. G. (2000). The Divide-and-Conquer Manifesto In Algorithmic Learning Theory 11th International Conference (ALT 2000) (pp. 13–26). New York: Springer-Verlag. Dietterich, T. G. (2000). Hierarchical reinforcement learning with the MAXQ value function decomposition. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 13, 227-303. Dietterich, T. G. (2000). Machine Learning. In David Hemmendinger, Anthony Ralston and Edwin Reilly (Eds.), The Encyclopedia of Computer Science, Fourth Edition, Thomson Computer Press. 1056-1059. Dietterich, T. G. (2000). An Overview of MAXQ Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning. In B. Y. Choueiry and T. Walsh (Eds.) Proceedings of the Symposium on Abstraction, Reformulation and Approximation SARA 2000, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (pp. 26–44), New York: Springer Verlag.