David Waltz
David L. Waltz (born May 28, 1943 in Boston , † March 22, 2012 in Princeton ) was a computer scientist who worked in the fields of artificial intelligence , machine vision , machine learning and information retrieval . Most recently he was a professor at Columbia University .
His father was a physicist at Bell Laboratories. He studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , where he received his doctorate from Patrick Winston in 1972 (Generating Semantic Descriptions from Drawings of Scenes with Shadows). In his dissertation, he developed a program that reconstructed a three-dimensional scene from two-dimensional drawings. He developed the Waltz algorithm for the recognition of three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional line graphics with shadows, whereby the problem is formulated as a constraint satisfaction problem (and known as constraint propagation ). The process was later of fundamental importance in computer vision and computer graphics, but also in other areas of artificial intelligence and computer science such as routing and scheduling . At MIT he was also a student of Marvin Minsky .
Waltz taught as a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and at Brandeis University . He was involved in the establishment of interdisciplinary research centers at both universities, the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois and the Volen National Center for Complex Systems at Brandeis University.
At the University of Illinois, he turned to natural language processing. He built a question-and-answer system (planes) and used neural networks in natural language processing.
In 1984 he had another breakthrough as a pioneer of CBR (Case Based Reasoning, Memory Based Reasoning) due to his access to parallel computers at the Thinking Machine Corporation (TMC) of Danny Hillis . Instead of procedures, the method relied on access to large collections of data. That was at the beginning of a revolution in the field of artificial intelligence and other methods that access big data. He also pioneered information retrieval systems at TMC (WAIS, Wide Area Information Server, developed with Dow Jones Corporation, Apple Computer and KPMG Peat Marwick). Search algorithms were also introduced (Veronica, Gopher, Archie), which advanced search engines.
In 1993 he left TMC and went to the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, of which he was director from 2000 to 2002. He was also one of the founders (and director) of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University . Among other things, early warning systems were developed there for the breakdown of power supply (in collaboration with the electricity supplier Con Edison) and for seizures in epilepsy patients (from data from electrodes in the patient's brain).
Works (selection)
- Generating Semantic Description from Drawings of Scenes with Shadows , Ph.D. Dissertation, MIT, 1972.
- Understanding line drawings of scenes with shadows, in: Patrick Winston (Ed.): The Psychology of Computer Vision, 1975
- Toward memory-based reasoning (PDF; 5.3 MB), (with C. Stanfill), Communications of the ACM, v29n12, pp. 1213-1228,1986.
- Massively parallel parsing: A strongly interactive model of natural language interpretation (PDF; 1.4 MB), (with J. Pollack), Cognitive Science, v9n1, pp. 51-74, 1985.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ David Waltz in the Mathematics Genealogy Project (English)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Waltz, David |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Waltz, David L. |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American computer scientist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 28, 1943 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boston |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 22, 2012 |
| Place of death | Princeton |