In memory of Tom Fawcett
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In memory of Tom Fawcett Foster Provost1,2
© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Editor’s note: I learned of Tom Fawcett’s passing after my final editorial went to print for the July 2020 issue of Machine Learning. Tom was one of the people I thanked by name as he had served as Survey Editor for many years, a role he inaugurated. I asked Foster Provost, Tom’s friend and collaborator for many years and also my predecessor as Editorin-Chief, to write a personal reflection on what it was like to work with Tom. Peter Flach (Editor-in-Chief, 2010–2020)
1 Introduction My dear friend Tom Fawcett was killed on June 4th in a freak bicycle accident. Tom was a brilliant scholar, a selfless collaborator, a substantial contributor for three decades to the field of Machine Learning and to Data Science more generally, and a unique individual. I wrote a blog entry1 in memory of Tom and Peter asked me whether I’d like to turn it into an in memoriam editorial, given all of Tom’s contributions to the field and to the Machine Learning journal. Peter thought I might tell the story of Tom’s and my 2001 MLJ paper, which had a marked effect on both of our careers, and maybe on the field—and has an aspect or two about it that might be revealing to young scholars who can’t yet count the grey hairs caused by the vaguaries of the scholarly process. I’ll close with a (fun) memory of Tom.
2 Tom Tom and I collaborated closely for much of my career. We started working together in 1994, when I joined what’s now Verizon (then NYNEX Science and Technology). My initial impression was that Tom was a curmudgeon (yes, even back then), and I had some doubts about what working with him would be like. Very soon I realized that beneath this 1
https://www.kdnuggets.com/2020/06/tom-fawcett-memoriam.html.
* Foster Provost [email protected] 1
Technology, Operations and Statistics, Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, USA
2
Compass Inc., New York, USA
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impression he was a kind, thoughtful, caring guy, as well as a brilliant data scientist. He was my main day-to-day professional partner up until we both left for other jobs in late 1999. That was a magical half decade. Tom was the sort of collaborator where one afternoon we would adjorn our meeting with a set of items for each to do, and when we got together the next day Tom would have done all of his plus several more crucial things that had come up in the process. That was the case even if in the intervening evening we had gone out to see some 90s neo-punk or heavy alt rock band, which we liked to do. Because of this, I myself had to double down—I wasn’t going to be the slacker on the team. Without any doubt I did substantially better work because I was working with Tom than I would have done on my own.
3 The work that changed our careers So, back in those days Tom and I were wonderfully productive, writing a bunch of papers together that have since got
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