In collaboration with several psychologists and with my former student, David Danks, I also work on mathematical aspects of the psychology of causal reasoning, work that I have recently summarized in The Mind's Arrows: Bayes Nets and Graphical Causal Models in Psychology (MIT, 2003). With the Computational Systems Biology Group, I work on the possibilities and limitations of machine learning procedures for inferring gene regulation from measurements of messenger RNA concentrations. With Joseph Ramsey and with collaborators at NASA Ames I work on automated identification of mineral composition from spectra. My current research applies previous work on causal Bayes nets and formal learning theory to a variety of topics. This program was realized in our Causation, Prediction and Search (Springer, 1993 2nd Edition, MIT, 2001) and in related work by many people, including our students, Chris Meek at Microsoft and Thomas Richardson in Statistics at the University of Washington. Kelly has continued and radically extended that work in his wonderful book, The Logic of Reliable Inquiry (Oxford, 1987) and in subsequent papers.īy 1990 Scheines, Spirtes and I had developed the causal interpretation of Bayes nets, and outlined a program of research: to find feasible search algorithms, characterize indistinguishability, and generate algorithms for prediction from interventions on partially characterized causal structures. In this same period, in collaboration with Kelly, extended formal learning theory, as developed by Gold and Putnam for learning recursively enumerable sets and recursive functions, to learning formalized theories. A collaboration with my students, Kevin Kelly, Richard Scheines and Peter Spirtes developed automated heuristic procedures for respecification of linear latent variable models, later described in Discovering Causal Structure (Academic Press, 1987). In the same period I became interested in the possibility of automated procedures for finding causal explanations in the social sciences. In the 1980s, in collaboration with John Earman, I worked on historical topics in late 19th and early 20th century psychiatry (that was an accident-I had to teach a course on Freud!) and physics, especially on the genesis and testing of the special and general theories of relativity. In this same period I worked on philosophically interesting global properties of models of general relaivity. My work in the 1970s focussed on traditional issues in the philosophy of science, especially formal accounts of the confirmation of scientific theories.

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