John Platt (computer scientist)
{{Short description|American computer scientist (born 1963)}}
{{Other people|John Platt|John Platt (disambiguation)}}
{{Infobox scientist
| name = John Platt
| birth_date = {{birth year and age|1963}}
| workplaces = Google, Microsoft Research
| alma_mater = California Institute of Technology
| thesis_title = Constraint methods for neural networks and computer graphics
| thesis_url = https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/617/
| thesis_year = 1989
| doctoral_advisor = Alan H. Barr
Carver Mead
John Hopfield
| website = {{URL|https://ai.google/research/people/JohnPlatt}}
}}
John Carlton Platt (born 1963) is an American computer scientist. He is currently a Fellow at Google,{{Cite web |title=John C. Platt |url=https://research.google/people/johnplatt/?&type=google |access-date=2024-09-04 |website=Research at Google}} where he leads the Applied Science branch of Google Research.{{Cite web |title=Applied science |url=https://research.google/teams/applied-science/#:~:text=There%20are%20four%20main%20efforts,-the-art%20in%20computation. |access-date=2025-03-29 |website=research.google |language=en}} Formerly he was a deputy managing director at Microsoft Research Redmond Labs.{{cite web|url=http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/about/directors.aspx|title=Microsoft Research Leadership|accessdate=July 6, 2014}} Platt worked for Microsoft from 1997 to 2015. Before that, he served as director of research at Synaptics.
Life and work
Platt was born in Elgin, Illinois, and matriculated at California State University, Long Beach, at the age of 14. After graduating from CSULB at the age of 18, he enrolled in a computer science PhD program at California Institute of Technology.
While a student at Caltech under astronomer Gene Shoemaker, he discovered two asteroids, 3259 Brownlee and 3237 Victorplatt at Palomar Observatory on 25 September 1984. The latter he named after his father Victor Platt, while the former was named by Gene Shoemaker. Shoemaker allowed Platt to name one of his discoveries, 3927 Feliciaplatt, which he named after his mother.
In 1998, Platt invented sequential minimal optimization, a widely used algorithm for speeding up the training of support vector machines, which fixed the issue that quadratic programming brought to early machine learning techniques.{{Cite web |last=Platt |first=John |date=1998 |title=Sequential Minimal Optimization: A Fast Algorithm for Training Support Vector Machines |url=https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/tr-98-14.pdf |citeseerx=10.1.1.43.4376}}
In 1999, Platt continued his work into support vector machines, creating Platt scaling, a method to turn SVMs (and other classifiers) into probability models.{{Cite web |last=Platt |first=John |date=March 26, 1999 |title=Probabilistic Outputs for Support Vector Machines and Comparison to Regularized Likelihood Methods |url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2594015_Probabilistic_Outputs_for_Support_Vector_Machines_and_Comparisons_to_Regularized_Likelihood_Methods}}
In August 2005, Apple Computer had its application for a patent on the interface of the popular iPod music player rejected by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The reason appears to be that Platt had submitted a patent application for a similar interface design five months prior to Apple's claim.{{cite news|url=http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/08/16/ipodpatent/index.php|title=Inside Apple's iPod patent problems|work=Macworld|first=Jim|last=Dalrymple|date=August 16, 2005|access-date=August 26, 2005|archive-date=August 28, 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080828225022/http://www.macworld.com/news/2005/08/16/ipodpatent/index.php|url-status=dead}}
Platt shared a 2005 Scientific and Technical Achievement Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with Demetri Terzopoulos for their pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures.https://web.archive.org/web/20060413204557/http://www.oscars.org/78academyawards/scitech/winners.html (Backup at archive.org of http://www.oscars.org/78academyawards/scitech/winners.html Retrieved 2009-01-08.
References
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External links
- [http://research.microsoft.com/~jplatt/asteroid.htm Asteroids discovered by John Platt]
- [https://web.archive.org/web/20130920204744/http://blogs.technet.com/b/next/archive/2011/02/16/machine-learning-for-dummies-john-platt.aspx#.U7l1ZLFu6tM Machine Learning for Dummies]
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Category:California Institute of Technology alumni
Category:California State University, Long Beach alumni
Category:Discoverers of minor planets