THOMAS G. DIETTERICH is a Distinguished Professor of computer science at Oregon State University. He is one of the founders of the field of Machine Learning. Among his research contributions was the application of error-correcting output coding to multiclass classification, the formalization of the multiple-instance problem, the MAXQ framework for hierarchical reinforcement learning, and the development of methods for integrating non-parametric regression trees into probabilistic graphical models (including conditional random fields and latent variable models).
Dietterich served as Executive Editor of Machine Learning (1992-98) and helped co-found the Journal of Machine Learning Research. He is currently the editor of the MIT Press series on Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning. He also served as co-editor of the Morgan-Claypool Synthesis Series on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. He has organized several conferences and workshops including serving as Technical Program Co-Chair of the National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), Technical Program Chair of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS-2000) and General Chair of NIPS-2001 He is a Fellow of the ACM, AAAI, and AAAS. He served as founding President of the International Machine Learning Society, and he is currently a member of the Steering Committee of the Asian Conference on Machine Learning.