PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Jacob Andreas

Jacob Andreas is a computer scientist at MIT who studies language as a way for machines to learn from people. He coauthored Neural Module Networks in 2015 and received an ICML Best Paper Honorable Mention in 2017, with Dan Klein and Sergey Levine, for policy-sketch reinforcement learning. After a Berkeley PhD under Klein in 2018, he joined the MIT faculty in July 2019, won the 2023 Junior Bose Award, and became a 2024 Sloan Research Fellow. In 2026 he shared the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, and as of October 2026 he is ITT Career Development Professor in Computer Technology and an associate professor of EECS affiliated with CSAIL.

Now at
MIT CSAIL

Timeline

  1. 2015

    Neural module networks

    In 2015, he coauthors Neural Module Networks with Marcus Rohrbach, Trevor Darrell and Dan Klein. The method splits a question into its linguistic substructures and assembles jointly trained modular networks for visual question answering.

  2. 2017

    Policy sketches honored at ICML

    In 2017, he receives an ICML Best Paper Honorable Mention with Dan Klein and Sergey Levine for Modular Multitask Reinforcement Learning with Policy Sketches. The paper annotates tasks with sequences of named subtasks and learns a modular subpolicy for each one.

  3. 2018

    A Berkeley PhD with Klein

    He completes his PhD in EECS at UC Berkeley in 2018, advised by Daniel Klein, with the dissertation Learning from Language on using linguistic structure to shape machine learning models. He also holds an M.Phil. from Cambridge, where he studied as a Churchill scholar, and a B.S. from Columbia.

  4. July 2019

    Joining the MIT faculty

    He joins the MIT faculty in July 2019 and is affiliated with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. His work is in natural language processing and, more broadly, in AI.

  5. 2023

    The Junior Bose Award

    MIT's School of Engineering gives him the 2023 Junior Bose Award for teaching while he is the X-Window Consortium Professor in EECS. His teaching includes class 6.8610, Natural Language Processing.

  6. 2024

    A Sloan Research Fellowship

    He receives a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2024.

  7. 2026

    The Edgerton Faculty Award

    He and chemist Brett McGuire win the 2026 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, MIT's annual award for distinction in teaching, research, and service.

  8. As of October 2026

    Associate professor at MIT

    He is ITT Career Development Professor in Computer Technology and an associate professor of EECS at MIT, affiliated with CSAIL. His research aims to understand the computational foundations of language learning and to build systems that learn from human guidance.

Career

  1. Since 2019Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyFaculty, X-Window Consortium Professor in EECS
  2. NowMIT CSAILAffiliate

Education

  1. 2018University of California, BerkeleyPhD
  2. University of CambridgeM.Phil.
  3. Columbia UniversityB.S.

From the biography.

  1. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.
  2. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other universityIncludes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology trained or employed 44 of the 187 AI major-prize winners, more than any other university. We compare doctorate and 5+ year employment links, career timing and current workplaces for 187 major-prize and 1,111 best-paper winners.
  3. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Includes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  4. The company share of AI researchers’ top papers was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974Includes Massachusetts Institute of Technology. We estimate where the people shaping AI worked when their most-cited papers appeared: the company share was 31% in 2020–2024 and 8% in 1970–1974, and Google led all organizations in 2020–2024.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Jacob Andreas yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Neural Module Networks arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. Modular Multitask Reinforcement Learning with Policy Sketches arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. ICML 2017 Awards icml.cc. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. Learning from Language | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. Jacob Andreas @ MIT > Bio mit.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. Jacob Andreas and Brett McGuire named Edgerton Award winners - MIT EECS eecs.mit.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  7. Jacob Andreas and Mingda Li honored with Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching - MIT EECS eecs.mit.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  8. Jacob Andreas - MIT EECS eecs.mit.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.
  9. Jacob Andreas @ MIT mit.edu. Checked 21 October 2026.