Her major work has been in the areas of analogical reasoning, complex systems, genetic algorithms and cellular automata, and her publications in those fields are frequently cited.
[2] She received her PhD in 1990 from the University of Michigan under Douglas Hofstadter and John Holland, for which she developed the Copycat cognitive architecture.
She has also critiqued Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science[3] and showed that genetic algorithms could find better solutions to the majority problem for one-dimensional cellular automata.
[7] In 2018, Barbara Grosz, Dawn Song and Melanie Mitchell organised the workshop "On Crashing the Barrier of Meaning in AI".
[8] She features regularly as guest expert in the Learning Salon, an online interdisciplinary meeting about biological and artificial intelligence.