He received an equivalent of Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at the Universities of Technology in Kraków and Warsaw in 1959; obtained M.S.
In the period 1962–1970 he worked at the Institute of Automation of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAS) in Warsaw, during which he and Jacek Karpiński developed an early successful learning system for recognizing handwritten alpha-numeric characters.
[3] Michalski was cofounder of Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory at George Mason University.
He earned a patent for the university with Learnable Non-Darwinian Evolution Model (LEM), a form of evolutionary computation, in 2003.
Michalski was prolific author of scientific works on various topics in computer science, including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and human plausible reasoning.