Textbook of AI

1951–, Computer scientist

Also known as: Tom M. Mitchell

Tom Michael Mitchell is an American computer scientist whose 1997 textbook Machine Learning was for two decades the standard introductory text in the field. The book's classical definition of machine learning, "A program learns from experience E with respect to task T and performance measure P, if its performance on T, as measured by P, improves with E", is now universally cited.

Mitchell founded Carnegie Mellon's Machine Learning Department in 2006, the first such department in the world, and led the Never-Ending Language Learning (NELL) project, which from 2010 ran continuously to extract structured knowledge from the web. He has been an outspoken commentator on the ethical and policy implications of AI throughout his career.