Jerry Feldman
Emeritus Director, Artificial Intelligence
feldman @ icsi.berkeley.edu
Jerome Feldman received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Rochester in 1960, graduating with distinction. After one year with Westinghouse, he received his master’s in mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh in 1961 and his doctorate in computer science and mathematics from Carnegie Mellon University in 1964. He then joined the staff of MIT Lincoln Lab, where he worked on associative processing. From 1966 to 1974, Feldman was first an assistant professor and then an associate professor of computer science at Stanford University. Beginning in 1970, he also served as an associate director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. His work focused on vision, robotics, probabilistic reasoning and grammatical inference. In 1974, he moved to the University of Rochester to establish its Computer Science Department; he also served as a professor in the department and as a vice provost. In 1981, he was named the university’s first John H. Dessauer Professor. He held the position until 1988, when he was appointed ICSI’s founding director and a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. He served as ICSI’s director until 1998. He was also the director of the Cognitive Science Program at UC Berkeley in 2005, Feldman received an honorary doctorate from the University of Rochester in 1998 and the Berkeley Citation in 2009. He was a Fulbright Lecturer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem from 1970 to 1971. He is a charter fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His research interests include cognitive science, natural language understanding and learning, and computational biology with a current focus on computational issues in the classic mind/brain problem. He has supervised over a hundred doctoral and post-doctoral students.