Pedro Domingos

Pedro Domingos was born in 1965 in Lisbon, Portugal. He began his higher education at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), where he earned an undergraduate degree and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1988 and 1992, respectively. He then moved to the University of California, Irvine, receiving a Master of Science in 1994 and a Ph.D. in Information and Computer Science in 1997. His doctoral work focused on a unified approach to concept learning.

After completing his Ph.D., Domingos spent two years as an assistant professor at IST. In 1999, he joined the University of Washington as an assistant professor of Computer Science and Engineering, becoming a full professor in 2012 and later a Professor Emeritus. His research has shaped several fields, including statistical relational AI, data stream mining, adversarial learning, machine learning for information integration, and influence maximization in social networks. He is recognized for the Markov logic network, which enables uncertain inference. His work culminated in the publication of “The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World” in 2015, a worldwide bestseller, and “2040: A Silicon Valley Satire” in 2024.

Throughout his distinguished career, Domingos has received numerous accolades. He was honored with the SIGKDD Innovation Award in 2014 for his foundational research in data stream analysis, cost-sensitive classification, adversarial learning, and Markov logic networks. In 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the AAAI for his significant contributions to machine learning and the unification of first-order logic and probability. Other distinctions include an NSF CAREER Award, a Sloan Fellowship in 2003, a Fulbright Scholarship from 1992 to 1997, and an IBM Faculty Award. He has also served on the editorial board of “Machine Learning” journal and co-founded the International Machine Learning Society, consistently contributing to the academic and research communities.