Melanie Mitchell
Professor at the Santa Fe Institute
A Santa Fe Institute professor known for the Copycat analogy-making system, work on genetic algorithms and complexity, and books on thinking about AI.
Biography
Melanie Mitchell is an American computer scientist and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. She studied physics, astronomy and mathematics at Brown University, and earned her PhD at the University of Michigan in 1990 under Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland, with a dissertation on the Copycat cognitive architecture.
Her major work has been in analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata. She wrote Analogy-Making as Perception, An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms (1996), Complexity: A Guided Tour (2009), which won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award, and Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans. She developed the Complexity Explorer platform for the Santa Fe Institute, and more than 25,000 students took her course Introduction to Complexity.
Notable contributions
Developed the Copycat cognitive architecture
Created Copycat, a computer model of high-level perception and analogy-making, as her 1990 doctoral dissertation.
Wrote Complexity: A Guided Tour
Authored the 2009 book that won the 2010 Phi Beta Kappa Science Book Award.
Built the Complexity Explorer platform
Developed the Santa Fe Institute's online learning platform; more than 25,000 students took her Introduction to Complexity course.