Other disciples include Zou Bin Gahramani, Tommy Jacquela, Eric Xing and David Bray, and their disciples are all over the famous American schools. The main research and contributions of this big school focus on statistical machine learning and probability graph models, such as spectral clustering, nonparametric Bayesian method, variable method and so on.
Graph model and nonparametric Bayesian method are the research hotspots in the field of machine learning. Michael Jordan's research links statistics and machine learning well and develops various methods. He also held positions in the statistics department and the computer department.
Andrew Ng has a wide range of academic research interests. What he does is theory, but more is the combination of theory and application. His work mainly focuses on spectral clustering, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning, and involves many aspects of machine learning, such as feature selection, over-fitting and strategy search. Because he is engaged in reinforcement learning and unsupervised learning, many projects are related to robots, and he also initiated ROS (Robot Operation Sy).
His current research interest is mainly deep learning, which is a revived neural network. The originator of neural network is Jeffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto. Jeffrey Hinton and Andrew Ng worked together on the Google Brain Project, and now they have many papers in this field, which have great influence.
Generally speaking, he is a top machine learning researcher, which has been illustrated by being a tenured professor at Stanford. As for the laboratory director, it has nothing to do with academics. As long as you are a professor, you can set up your own laboratory to be the director. Don't bring the director here to talk about things.