The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has elected Eric P. Xing, professor of machine learning and director of the Center for Machine Learning and Health, one of six 2016 AAAI fellows.

The new class of fellows will be recognized at a dinner Sunday, Feb. 14, during the annual AAAI conference in Phoenix. Xing joins 17 current or former CMU faculty members previously named AAAI fellows.

The fellows program recognizes individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the AI field. Xing was cited "for significant contributions to statistical machine learning, its theoretical analysis, new algorithms for learning probabilistic models, and applications of these to important problems in biology, social network analysis, natural language processing and beyond; and to the development of new architecture, system platform and theory for distributed machine learning programs on large-scale applications."

Xing's principal research interests lie in the development of machine learning and statistical methodology, and large-scale computational system and architecture for solving problems involving automated learning, reasoning and decision-making in high-dimensional, multimodal, and dynamic possible worlds in complex systems.

A native of Shanghai, Xing earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Tshinghua University in Beijing. He earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University, and then a Ph.D. in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He joined the CMU faculty in 2004 and was named a full professor in 2014. He received the NSF Career Award, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the United States Air Force Young Investigator Award and the IBM Open Collaborative Research Faculty Award.