National Center Professor of Resource Management and Technology: Michael Kearns

Dr. Michael Kearns has been named the National Center Professor of Resource Management and Technology in SEAS. Dr. Kearns received his Ph.D. in computer science from Harvard University in 1989, where his dissertation, “The Computational Complexity of Machine Learning,” won a Distinguished Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and was published by the MIT Press. Following postdoctoral fellowships at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley, he spent a decade in basic research at Bell Laboratories and AT&T Laboratories, where he headed the artificial intelligence and machine learning research department.

He joined the Penn faculty in computer and information science in 2002. He is co-director of Penn’s Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, and holds a secondary appointment in the operations and information management department of the Wharton School.

Dr. Kearns’ research interests lie in artificial intelligence, machine learning and related areas. In recent years he has been particularly active in research at the intersection of computer science, economics and game theory, as well as in topics in computational finance. He has designed the new undergraduate course, “Networked Life,” open to all majors and levels at Penn, which examines a rich mixture of topics in social network theory, economics, mathematics and computer science. He is co-author with U.V. Vazirani of the book, An Introduction to Computational Learning Theory, published by the MIT Press in 1994.

Dr. Kearns is a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), has served as program chair for many of the major international conferences on AI and machine learning, and has served on many editorial boards including the Journal of the ACM, SIAM Journal on Computing, Mathematics of Operations Research and Machine Learning.