The School of Computer Science's Machine Learning Department (MLD) celebrated its 25th anniversary recently by bringing together faculty, alumni, friends and some of the top minds in the field.

MLD is considered the world's first machine learning academic department. It was founded in 2006, but the department has its roots in the Center for Automated Learning and Discover (CALD), created in 1997.

"So many amazing people have passed through the Machine Learning Department and CALD over the years. It was wonderful to catch up with them and to hear about the outsized impact our former members are having on the world," said Tom Mitchell, the first and longest-serving head of the department. "It was also great for them to meet our newest generation of faculty and students, who are hot on their heels."

Invited guests gathered at Carnegie Mellon University for keynotes, networking, panels and even a trivia session about machine learning at the university. Former MLD members Manuela Veloso, Joëlle Pineau, Sebastian Thrun and Zoubin Ghahramani returned to headline the two-day celebration, held Sept. 30 and Oct. 1.

Veloso is the head of J.P. Morgan Chase AI Research and the Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita at SCS, where she was faculty and the head of MLD. Pineau, who earned her Ph.D. from MLD, is an associate professor at McGill University and the managing director of the Meta AI Research department. Now the CEO of Kitty Hawk Corporation, Thrun's previous roles include co-founder of Udacity, Google vice president and fellow, and a professor of computer science at Stanford University and CMU. Ghahramani, a former MLD faculty member, is vice president of research at Google, a professor of information engineering at the University of Cambridge, and a former chief scientist and vice president of AI at Uber.

When it was created, CALD brought together faculty in computer science, statistics, philosophy, engineering, business and biological science. In 1999, the center launched its first education program, a master's degree in knowledge discovery and data mining. Its Ph.D. program in computational and statistical learning followed in 2002.

When CMU established MLD as an academic department in 2006, the university signaled both its belief that machine learning forms a field of enduring academic importance and its intention to be a leader in shaping it. The department now has nearly 40 core faculty members plus dozens of adjunct, visiting, affiliated and related faculty members. It offers four Ph.D. programs, a master's program and is part of CMU's artificial intelligence undergraduate degree program.

More information about the Machine Learning Department is available on its website.