Paying homage to a Champion...

I'd like to begin this blog with a brief anecdote about one of Machine Learning's stalwarts. Last week, I had the utmost pleasure of meeting one of my heroes, Dr. Tom Mitchell. For those of you not familiar with that name, he is a well-respected authority on Machine Learning and for quite some time, his book was the premier text book for Machine Learning courses across the country:

Link to book on Amazon

[Exeunt: It was this book, that sparked my passion for the field, and I haven't looked back ever since. For those of you even remotely interested in the field, you would be hard-pressed to find a book with as much clarity, detail and ease-of-comprehension factor. For what its worth, I highly recommend this book.]

Unbeknownst to my hero, I was more than a little star-struck as I heard him give a talk on the potential of leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) on the web and learning Concepts. I will try and address the talk itself and its relevance to my research in latter articles, but for the eager, Tom has quite a few of his publications on his website and they're easy to read and comprehend:

Articles on his CMU website

After the talk I had a chance to engage him in conversation about the potential for techniques in NLP being leveraged in Music Analysis [article on it coming shortly]. Tom actually stayed 20 minutes after the talk to express his ideas on the topic. Do note that my query wasn't directly related to his talk or anything he was working on...and that, comparatively speaking, he was addressing a complete ignoramus. I was completely taken aback by the level of genuine investment in research – be it his own or someone else's - that Tom has. Everything he said was founded firmly in his own research and knowledge, and he produced deep and meaningful analogies on the subject – far from the superficial hand-wave of a response I usually get from other researchers in Machine Learning. Even more compelling than his intellect and commitment to research was his humility in addressing all of those who spoke to him, including myself. He entertained all of our ideas, which I can only imagine were bordering on absurd, with such genuine enthusiasm that those in attendance must have been forced to acknowledge an intellectual and emotional mettle that transcends that of us mere mortals.

As such, I want to start this blog by offering a very humble tip of the hat to one of the Champions of research. Its people like Dr. Tom Mitchell that reinforce my belief in self-actualization being achieved through the pursuit of research...which I imagine isn't terribly different than pursuing Art. Here's to you Tom...