David Wolpert. Photo by Douglas Merriam

SFI Professor David Wolpert has been included in a NASA Group Achievement Award for his work on the Machine Learning and Data Sciences Team. In an email to the members of the team, NASA thanked researchers for their “groundbreaking machine learning and data mining work within NASA through development of novel algorithms and new methods.” 

Over 15 years, the team organized workshops on machine learning when the field was still nascent, published more than 100 journal and conference papers, and identified machine learning solutions that and influenced fields from aeronautics and space exploration to earth and space sciences. 

“The Machine Learning and Data Sciences Team has been paving the way in an area of national importance through the development of novel algorithms and new methods that have become benchmark technologies both within the Agency as well as within academic, scientific, and operational communities,” NASA wrote to the team. 

Wolpert was part of the team during his work at NASA Ames Research Center, which spanned 1997 through 2011. He joined the SFI residential faculty in September 2013 after two years as an external professor based at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Wolpert continues to research machine learning to improve optimization, as well as studying game theory to model human operation in complex engineered systems and using non-equilibrium statistical physics to analyze the thermodynamics of computation.