Melanie Mitchell

Biography

Melanie Mitchell received a B.A. in Mathematics from Brown University in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1990. Her dissertation work with Douglas Hofstadter was on cognitive modeling of high-level perception and analogy-making. From 1990 to 1992 she was a Junior Fellow in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, with a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. Since 1992 she has been on the research faculty of the Santa Fe Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and directs the Institute's Adaptive Computation program. She is also on the research faculty of the Computer Science Department of the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Her research is on intelligent systems, machine learning, and cognitive science (particularly theory and applications of evolutionary computation, computer models of adaptive systems, and computer models of analogy-making); parallel, distributed, and decentralized computation in spatially extended systems; and, more generally, understanding how natural systems perform computation, and how to use ideas from natural systems to develop new kinds of computational systems.

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