The David Blackwell Lectures: Professor David Blackwell (1919 - 2010) was a distinguished American statistician and mathematician who made significant contributions to game theory, probability theory, information theory, and Bayesian statistics. He is one of the eponyms of the Rao-Blackwell theorem and became the first African-American elected member of the US National Academy of Sciences.

As a Department, we wanted to mark his ground-breaking work and are delighted to hold this annual lecture named after him in October each year.  

We are delighted to have Professor Michael I. Jordan give this year's lecture. Please register your place here.

Speaker:   Michael I. Jordan Inria Paris and the University of California, Berkeley

Title:         A Collectivist, Economic Perspective on AI 

Abstract: Information technology is in the midst of a revolution in which omnipresent data collection and machine learning are impacting the human world as never before.  The word "intelligence" is being used as a North Star for the development of this technology, with human cognition viewed as a baseline.  This view neglects the fact that humans are social animals, and that much of our intelligence is social and cultural in origin.  Thus, a broader framing is to consider the system level, where the agents in the system, be they computers or humans, are active, they are cooperative, and they wish to obtain value from their participation in learning-based systems. Agents may supply data and other resources to the system only if it is in their interest to do so, and they may be honest and cooperative only if it is in their interest to do so. Critically, intelligence inheres as much in the overall system as it does in individual agents.  This is a perspective that is familiar in economics, although without the focus on learning algorithms.  A key challenge is thus to bring (micro)economic concepts into contact with foundational issues in the computing and statistical sciences.  I'll discuss some concrete examples of problems and solutions at this tripartite interface.

Bio: Michael I. Jordan is a researcher at Inria Paris and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.  His research interests bridge the computational, statistical, cognitive, biological and social sciences.  Prof. Jordan is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society.  He was a winner of a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2025 and was the inaugural winner of the World Laureates Association (WLA) Prize in 2022.  He was a Plenary Lecturer at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2018.  He has received the Ulf Grenander Prize from the American Mathematical Society, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, the IJCAI Research Excellence Award, the David E.  
Rumelhart Prize, and the ACM/AAAI Allen Newell Award.  In 2016, Prof. Jordan was named the "most influential computer scientist" worldwide in an article in Science, based on rankings from the Semantic Scholar search engine.