David McAllester

David McAllester is a Professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC) and holds a part-time Professor position at the University of Chicago's Department of Computer Science. He earned his B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from MIT (1978, 1979, 1987). His research spans Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and Theoretical Computer Science, with notable contributions to automated theorem proving (Ontic system), reinforcement learning, probabilistic programming, and computer vision. He is a Fellow of AAAI (since 1997) and has received multiple test-of-time awards for seminal papers in AI planning, constraint solving, and computer vision.

Key Contributions:

• Developed the Ontic verification system for mathematical proofs.
• Pioneered conspiracy numbers in game tree search (influenced Deep Blue).
• Co-authored foundational work on policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning.
• Advanced PAC-Bayesian learning theory and co-training methods.

Teaching: Teaches TTIC31230 (Fundamentals of Deep Learning), emphasizing mathematical rigor and research skills in computer vision, NLP, and reinforcement learning.

Labs/Teams: Co-founded TTIC's research initiatives in AI and machine learning. Collaborates with industry and academia on foundational AI challenges.

Awards:

• AAAI Fellow (1997)
• Test-of-Time Awards (AAAI, ICLP, CVPR)