Brown CS News

Founded in 1780, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States, with early members who included Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Today, it’s an independent research center committed to multidisciplinary, nonpartisan research that engages experts in various fields to provide pragmatic solutions for complex challenges. Last month, Brown CS faculty member Michael Littman, Brown University’s Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence, received one of his profession’s highest honors by being elected an Academy member. 

Recognized for exceptional contributions in his field, Michael joins two other Brown CS members of the Academy, An Wang Professor of Computer Science Maurice Herlihy and Thomas J. Watson, Jr. University Professor of Technology and Education and Professor of Computer Science Andy van Dam. This year’s 250 new members join a distinguished group of individuals elected to the academy before them, including Alexander Hamilton, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Mead, and Martin Luther King Jr. This year’s class includes actor and filmmaker Jody Foster, author Barbara Kingsolver, entertainer Rita Moreno, and three other faculty members from Brown.

“I speak for Michael's colleagues,” comments Maurice Herlihy, “when I say we are thrilled that the Academy is as impressed with his brilliance and wit as we are.”

Michael received his doctorate from Brown CS in 1996 and has been a member of the faculty since 2012. His research focuses on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and decision-making under uncertainty, and as Brown’s first Associate Provost for Artificial Intelligence, he works to responsibly advance Brown’s engagement with AI across its academic missions. From 2022-25, Michael served as Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems at the National Science Foundation, where he oversaw an annual budget of $200 million in research funding in AI-related areas. In 2021, he chaired the One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence, a twice-per-decade study on the state of AI development. 

Michael is also an Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) Fellow, an Association for Computing Machinery Fellow, and was an AAAS Leshner Fellow. He’s been repeatedly honored for his teaching and research, with recent accolades that include the AAAI/EAAI Patrick Henry Winston Outstanding Educator Award for pioneering approaches to teaching AI and machine learning, and the AIJ Classic Paper Award from the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. He’s served on the editorial boards for The Journal of Machine Learning Research and The Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and has been General Chair of the International Conference on Machine Learning and the Reinforcement Learning and Decision Making Conference, held in Providence in 2022.

“Michael’s election to the Academy is richly deserved,” says Andy van Dam. “Michael is an outstanding teacher, a highly influential scholar in Reinforcement Learning, a key area of AI, and has provided prodigious service to the Department, the University, and the country, most recently through his turn as Division Director for Information and Intelligent Systems at the NSF.”

In the days prior to the induction ceremony, several current Academy members reached out to Michael to urge him to attend the event and a few, including Brown University Provost Francis J. Doyle III and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chancellor Charles Isbell, shared a photo showing them signing the official membership book.

A full list of this year’s new Academy members is available here.

For more information, click the link that follows to contact Brown CS Communications Manager Jesse C. Polhemus.