Aaron Mendon-Plasek

Specialization

History of Science and Technology, Science & Technology Studies, Histories of Computing, Mathematics/Statistics, Machine Learning & Artificial Intelligence, Pattern Recognition, Intellectual History, Digital History, Historical Epistemology

Aaron Mendon-Plasek is an assistant professor in the Department of History at Purdue University and a historian of science and technology. His work examines how schemes of quantification, including their material, cultural, technical, and institutional instantiations, have been used to imagine, enact, and justify social order. Building on his dissertation, his first book project provides a revisionist history of machine learning, from WWII to the present, that explores how and why it became thinkable and subsequently "reasonable" for learning machines and machine learning strategies, rooted in conceptions of creativity and human judgment, to adjudicate social questions in the 21st century. His research has been supported by a variety of fellowships and grants, including from the National Science Foundation, Columbia University, and the Charles Babbage Institute.  

Mendon-Plasek’s publications includes articles in BJHS Themes and IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, and a chapter in The Cultural Life of Machine Learning. He holds a PhD, MPhil, and MA in history from Columbia University, an MA in humanities and social thought from NYU, an MFA in writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BS in physics and astronomy and a BA in writing from Drake University. Prior to Purdue he was an associate research scholar in the Information Society Project at Yale University, where he remains an affiliated fellow.