Scholarship and Biography
Jordan Pollack is professor of Complex Systems and Computer Science at Brandeis University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois in 1987, and taught at Ohio State University from 1988 to 1994 prior to moving to Brandeis. He has advised many doctoral students across a range of different fields related to artificial intelligence, such as neural networks, dynamical systems, evolutionary computation, machine learning, cognitive science, artificial life, robotics, and educational technology. His laboratory, the Dynamical and Evolutionary Machine Organization, or DEMO, www.demo.cs.brandeis.edu, has been partially funded by ONR, NSF, Hewlett foundation, and DARPA. Jordan has also served as an advisor to high-tech startup companies, including Abuzz which was acquired by the New York Times, as well as founding Thinmail. The lab's work on automatically evolving and fabricating robots was front page news worldwide in August 2000, and he was named one of MIT Technology Review's "TR 10" in January 2001. In 2017 he was awarded the lifetime achievement award by the Int'l Society for Artificial Life.