Donald Geman
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Donald Jay Geman (born September 20, 1943) is an American applied mathematician and a leading researcher in the field of
machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...
and
pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the task of assigning a class to an observation based on patterns extracted from data. While similar, pattern recognition (PR) is not to be confused with pattern machines (PM) which may possess PR capabilities but their p ...
. He and his brother,
Stuart Geman Stuart Alan Geman (born March 23, 1949) is an American mathematician, known for influential contributions to computer vision, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, and the neurosciences. ikipediaList of important publications in comp ...
, are very well known for proposing the Gibbs sampler and for the first proof of the convergence of the simulated annealing algorithm, in an article that became a highly cited reference in engineering (over 21K citations according to Google Scholar, as of January 2018). He is a professor at the
Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...
and simultaneously a visiting professor at École Normale Supérieure de Cachan.


Biography

Geman was born in Chicago in 1943. He graduated from the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC, U of I, Illinois, or University of Illinois) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Champaign–Urbana metropolitan area, Illinois, United ...
in 1965 with a B.A. degree in English Literature and from
Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...
in 1970 with a Ph.D. in mathematics. His dissertation was entitled as "Horizontal-window conditioning and the zeros of stationary processes." He joined University of Massachusetts - Amherst in 1970, where he retired as a distinguished professor in 2001. Thereafter, he became a professor at th
Department of Applied Mathematics
at
Johns Hopkins University The Johns Hopkins University (often abbreviated as Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1876 based on the European research institution model, J ...
. He has also been a visiting professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan since 2001. He is a member of the
National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...
, and Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific soci ...
.


Work

D. Geman and J. Horowitz published a series of papers during the late 1970s on local times and occupation densities of stochastic processes. A survey of this work and other related problems can be found in the Annals of Probability. In 1984 with his brother Stuart, he published a milestone paper which is still today one of the most cited papers in the engineering literature. It introduces a Bayesian paradigm using Markov Random Fields for the analysis of images. This approach has been highly influential over the last 20 years and remains a rare tour de force in this rapidly evolving field. In another milestone paper, in collaboration with Y. Amit, he introduced the notion for randomized
decision trees A decision tree is a decision support system, decision support recursive partitioning structure that uses a Tree (graph theory), tree-like Causal model, model of decisions and their possible consequences, including probability, chance event ou ...
, which have been called random forests and popularized by Leo Breiman. Some of his recent works include the introduction of ''coarse-to-fine'' hierarchical cascades for object detection in computer vision and the TSP (Top Scoring Pairs) classifier as a simple and robust rule for classifiers trained on ''high dimensional small sample'' datasets in
bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...
.


References


External links


Donald Geman Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Geman, Donald 1943 births Living people 20th-century American mathematicians 21st-century American mathematicians American statisticians Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics