Avrim Blum
Also known as Avrim L. Blum
Avrim Blum is a computer scientist whose work spans theoretical computer science and machine learning. He earned degrees at MIT and served on Carnegie Mellon’s computer science faculty from 1992 to 2017, with research in learning theory, approximation algorithms, privacy, and fairness. With Tom Mitchell, he published the 1998 co-training paper that initiated multi-view learning; later, he developed a polynomial-time co-training algorithm with Yishay Mansour for linear separators. He became an ACM Fellow in 2007, received CMU’s Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in Computer Science, and as of October 2026 serves as TTIC’s interim president and chief academic officer.
Timeline
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1987–1991
Early results in machine learning
At MIT, he earned bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees in 1987, 1989 and 1991. In 1988, he published “Training a 3-node neural network is NP-complete.”
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1992–2017
From theory to fairness
He served on Carnegie Mellon’s computer science faculty from 1992 to 2017. His research spanned theoretical computer science and machine learning, including learning theory, approximation algorithms, algorithmic game theory, privacy and algorithmic fairness.
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1998
Learning from two data sources
With Tom Mitchell, he published the 1998 paper “Combining Labeled and Unlabeled Data with Co-Training,” which initiated the area of multi-view learning.
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2007
An ACM fellowship
The ACM named him a Fellow in 2007 for contributions to computational learning theory, approximation algorithms, online algorithms and AI planning.
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2011
Teaching computer science
He received CMU’s Herbert A. Simon Award for Teaching Excellence in Computer Science.
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2017
Co-training under weak dependence
With Yishay Mansour, he coauthored the first polynomial-time algorithm for co-training homogeneous linear separators under weak dependence. It learns from unlabeled data with one labeled example to break class symmetry.
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As of October 2026
Leading TTIC
He joined TTIC as chief academic officer in 2017. At the institute’s September 2026 graduation ceremony, he served as interim president and chief academic officer.
Sources and credits
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