Michael L. Littman

Michael L. Littman

Born	(1966-08-30) August 30, 1966 (age 50) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Nationality	American
Fields	Computer Science
Institutions	Brown University Rutgers University AT&T Duke University
Alma mater	Brown University Yale University
Thesis	Algorithms for sequential decision-making (1996)
Doctoral advisor	Leslie P. Kaelbling
Notable awards	AAAI Fellow
Website cs.brown.edu/~mlittman/

Michael Lederman Littman (born August 30, 1966) is a computer scientist. He works mainly in reinforcement learning, but has done work in machine learning, game theory, computer networking, partially observable Markov decision process solving, computer solving of analogy problems and other areas. He is currently a professor of computer science at Brown University.

Before graduate school, Littman worked with Thomas Landauer at Bellcore and was granted a patent for one of the earliest systems for Cross-language information retrieval. Littman received his Ph.D. in computer science from Brown University in 1996. From 1996 to 1999, he was a professor at Duke University. During his time at Duke, he worked on an automated crossword solver PROVERB, which won an Outstanding Paper Award in 1999 from AAAI and competed in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. From 2000 to 2002, he worked at AT&T. From 2002 to 2012, he was a professor at Rutgers University; he chaired the department from 2009-12. In Summer 2012 he returned to Brown University as a full professor. He also appeared in a TurboTax commercial.