Richard Scheines

Timeline

1. 1979–1987

   History and philosophy degrees

   He earns a BA in history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in 1979. In 1987, he completes a PhD in history and philosophy of science at the University of Pittsburgh, advised by Clark Glymour. He also coauthors Discovering Causal Structure: Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy of Science, and Statistical Modeling with Glymour, Peter Spirtes and Kevin Kelly in 1987.

2. 1988–1993

   Causation, Prediction, and Search

   He joins Carnegie Mellon's Department of Philosophy in 1988. With Peter Spirtes and Clark Glymour, he publishes Causation, Prediction, and Search in 1993. Their algorithms use observational data and background knowledge to identify a class of causal models that explains the data.

3. 1997

   Creating the HCI major

   In 1997, he leads the creation of Carnegie Mellon's undergraduate major in human-computer interaction and serves as its director for seven years.

4. 2003

   Learning measurement models

   In 2003, he coauthors 'Learning Measurement Models for Unobserved Variables' with Ricardo Silva, Clark Glymour and Peter Spirtes at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. The paper introduces an algorithm for finding groups of observed variables that share a single hidden cause, under standard causal Bayes net assumptions and without requiring prior knowledge of the number of latent variables.

5. 2005–2014

   Department head and dean

   He heads Carnegie Mellon's Department of Philosophy from 2005 to 2014. In 2014, he becomes Bess Family Dean of the Marianna Brown Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences.

6. 2020

   Tetrad receives an AI award

   In 2020, the Tetrad Automated Causal Discovery Platform wins a Super Artificial Intelligence Leader award at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai. He develops the open-source platform with Peter Spirtes, Clark Glymour and Joe Ramsey; it supports causal model building, testing and simulation, and implements dozens of causal discovery algorithms.

7. 2024

   The Doherty education award

   He receives Carnegie Mellon's Robert E. Doherty Award for Sustained Contributions to Excellence in Education in 2024. His education work includes using AI to create interactive tutors for formal logic and developing online courses in causal reasoning.

8. Since 2026

   University Professor and dean emeritus

   In 2026, Carnegie Mellon names him a University Professor, and he becomes dean emeritus after serving as Dietrich College's dean from 2014 to 2026. He is University Professor of Philosophy and holds a courtesy appointment in the Machine Learning Department. His research develops methods for learning causal relationships from statistical evidence.