Melanie Mitchell

Melanie Mitchell is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, with a focus on artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems. Her research explores conceptual abstraction, analogy-making, and reasoning in both human and machine intelligence.

She has authored six books, including the award-winning Complexity: A Guided Tour (2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award) and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans (shortlisted for the 2023 Cosmos Prize). She pioneered the Complexity Explorer platform, offering a popular online course on complex systems.

• Research Themes: Abstraction, analogy-making, and reasoning in AI; emergence in large language models; human vs. machine cognition.
• Recent Articles: Investigated deceptive behaviors in LLMs, robustness of analogical reasoning, and the limitations of AI intelligence metrics.
• Scientific Awards: Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award (2010), Senior Scientific Award (Complex Systems Society), Distinguished Cognitive Scientist Award (UC Merced), Herbert A. Simon Award (International Conference on Complex Systems).
• Students: Advised numerous Ph.D. and M.S. students at Portland State University and the Santa Fe Institute, including Max Quinn, Sheng Lundquist, and Payel Ghosh.