Richard Eugene Neapolitan was an American scientist. Neapolitan is most well-known for his role in establishing the use of
probability theory
Probability theory is the branch of mathematics concerned with probability. Although there are several different probability interpretations, probability theory treats the concept in a rigorous mathematical manner by expressing it through a set ...
in
artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence—perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by animals and humans. Example tasks in which this is done include speech r ...
and in the development of the field
Bayesian network
A Bayesian network (also known as a Bayes network, Bayes net, belief network, or decision network) is a probabilistic graphical model that represents a set of variables and their conditional dependencies via a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Bay ...
s.
Biography
Neapolitan grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in
Westchester, Illinois
Westchester is a village in Cook County, Illinois, United States. It is a western suburb of Chicago. The population was 16,892 at the 2020 census. The current Village President is Nick Steker, serving in the special role of acting president after ...
, which is a western suburb of
Chicago
(''City in a Garden''); I Will
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. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the
Illinois Institute of Technology
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Tracing its history to 1890, the present name was adopted upon the merger of the Armour Institute and Lewis Institute in 1940. The university has prog ...
. Neapolitan notes that he was unable to obtain an academic position after obtaining his Ph.D., owing to a glut of mathematicians and a recession in the 1970s, and so he worked as a model and in various computer science related positions.
The latter experience enabled him to obtain a faculty position in the Computer Science Department of
Northeastern Illinois University
Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) is a public university in Chicago, Illinois. NEIU serves approximately 9,000 students in the region and is a Hispanic-serving institution. The main campus is located in the community area of North Park wi ...
(NEIU) in 1980. He served the majority of his academic career at NEIU, including becoming Chair of Computer Science in 2002.
Research
In the 1980s, researchers from
cognitive science (e.g.,
Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl (born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks (see the article on beli ...
),
computer science
Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includi ...
(e.g.,
Peter C. Cheeseman and
Lotfi Zadeh
Lotfi Aliasker Zadeh (; az, Lütfi Rəhim oğlu Ələsgərzadə; fa, لطفی علیعسکرزاده; 4 February 1921 – 6 September 2017) was a mathematician, computer scientist, electrical engineer, artificial intelligence researcher, an ...
), decision analysis (e.g.,
Ross Shachter), medicine (e.g.,
David Heckerman and
Gregory Cooper), mathematics and statistics (e.g., Neapolitan,
Tod Levitt, and
David Spiegelhalter
Sir David John Spiegelhalter (born 16 August 1953) is a British statistician and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. From 2007 to 2018 he was Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk in the Statistical Laboratory at the Un ...
) and philosophy (e.g.,
Henry Kyburg
Henry E. Kyburg Jr. (1928–2007) was Gideon Burbank Professor of Moral Philosophy and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Rochester, New York, and Pace Eminent Scholar at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola, Fl ...
) met at the newly formed Workshop on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence to discuss how to best perform uncertain inference in artificial intelligence. Neapolitan presented an exposition on the use of the classical approach to probability versus the Bayesian approach in artificial intelligence at the 1988 Workshop. A more extensive philosophical treatise on the difference between the two approaches and the application of probability to artificial intelligence appeared in his 1989 text ''Probabilistic Reasoning in Expert Systems: Theory and Algorithms''.
Closely related to the issue of representing uncertainty in artificial intelligence, researchers at the Workshop on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence developed and discussed graphical models that could represent large joint probability distributions. Neapolitan formulated these efforts into a coherent field in the text ''Probabilistic Reasoning in Expert Systems: Theory and Algorithms''.
The text defines a causal (Bayesian) network, and proves a theorem showing that a
directed acyclic graph
In mathematics, particularly graph theory, and computer science, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) is a directed graph with no directed cycles. That is, it consists of vertices and edges (also called ''arcs''), with each edge directed from one v ...
and a discrete probability distribution
together constitute a Bayesian network if and only if
is equal to the product of its conditional distributions in
. The text also includes methods for doing inference in Bayesian networks, and a discussion of influence diagrams, which are Bayesian networks augmented with decision nodes and a value node. Many AI applications have since been developed using Bayesian networks and influence diagrams.
Neapolitan's "Probabilistic Reasoning in Expert Systems"
and
Judea Pearl
Judea Pearl (born September 4, 1936) is an Israeli-American computer scientist and philosopher, best known for championing the probabilistic approach to artificial intelligence and the development of Bayesian networks (see the article on beli ...
's "Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems"
have been widely recognized as formalizing the field of Bayesian networks, as seen in the works of
Eugene Charniak
Eugene Charniak is a professor of computer Science and cognitive Science at Brown University. He holds an A.B. in Physics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Computer Science. His research has always been in the area of l ...
, who, in 1991, noted both texts as the source for Bayesian network inference algorithms; P.W. Jones, who wrote a review of "Probabilistic Reasoning in Expert Systems"in 1992;
Cooper and Herskovits, who credit Neapolitan's text and Pearl's text for formalizing the theory of belief networks in their 1992 paper that developed the score-based method for learning Bayesian networks from data; and Simon Parsons, who, in 1995, compared the two texts and discussed their roles in establishing the field of probabilistic networks. More recently, in 2008, Dawn Holmes discussed Neapolitan's career and the contribution of his first text.
In the 1990s researchers strived to develop methods that could learn Bayesian networks from data. Neapolitan assimilated these efforts in the 2003 text ''Learning Bayesian Networks'',
which is the first book addressing learning Bayesian networks. Other Bayesian network books that Neapolitan authored include ''Probabilistic Methods for Financial and Marketing Informatics'',
which applies Bayesian networks to problems in finance and marketing; and ''Probabilistic Methods for Bioinformatics'',
which applies Bayesian networks to problems in biology. Neapolitan has also written ''Foundations of Algorithms''
and (with Xia Jiang) ''Artificial Intelligence: With an Introduction to Machine Learning''.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Neapolitan, Richard
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
21st-century American mathematicians
Illinois Institute of Technology alumni
Northeastern Illinois University faculty
Northwestern University faculty