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 inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

and

pattern recognition Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphics ...

. 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 In statistics, Gibbs sampling or a Gibbs sampler is a Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm for obtaining a sequence of observations which are approximated from a specified multivariate probability distribution, when direct sampling is diffic ...

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 Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hemisphere. It consi ...

and simultaneously a visiting professor at

École Normale Supérieure de Cachan École may refer to: * an elementary school in the French educational stages normally followed by secondary education Secondary education or post-primary education covers two phases on the International Standard Classification of Education scal ...

Biography

Geman was born in Chicago in 1943. He graduated from the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

in 1965 with a B.A. degree in English Literature and from

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

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 The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, it ...

in 1970, where he retired as a distinguished professor in 2001. Thereafter, he became a professor at th
Department of Applied Mathematics
at

. He has also been a visiting professor at the

since 2001. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of the

Institute of Mathematical Statistics The Institute of Mathematical Statistics is an international professional and scholarly society devoted to the development, dissemination, and application of statistics and probability. The Institute currently has about 4,000 members in all parts o ...

and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

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 tool that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm that only contains condit ...

, which have been called

random forests Random forests or random decision forests is an ensemble learning method for classification, regression and other tasks that operates by constructing a multitude of decision trees at training time. For classification tasks, the output of t ...

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.

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