Stanford alum and computer science ‘rock star’ felled by apparent heart attack at age 36
Ben Taskar, a Stanford Engineering alumnus and nationally recognized researcher in the field of machine learning, died Monday morning of an apparent heart attack. He was 36.
Taskar, who earned bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees from Stanford, had joined the faculty of the University of Washington's Computer Science and Engineering Department this year.
Daphne Koller, the Rajeev Motwani Professor in Computer Science at Stanford School of Engineering, remembered Taskar as "a remarkable human being. He was an exceptional researcher, who even as a graduate student and continuing to his work as a faculty member, made seminal contributions to machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing," Koller said. "Such academic talent is rare but even more so when combined with a gentleness of soul and a sweetness of nature, both of which characterized Ben."
Taskar's expertise was in getting computers to understand complex data, such as natural language sentences, images or videos. For example, some of his work was in computer vision – teaching a computer to recognize what is in an image, such as a dog, a bicycle, or a face. He was a leading figure in machine learning, or building computational systems that improve and learn with experience, according to the Seattle Times.
"Ben was a rock star in the computer science world. But more than that, he was also a warm, thoughtful and caring person," UW computer science and engineering department chairman Hank Levy told the Seattle Times.
Taskar received two best-paper awards as a doctoral student from the top conferences in his field. He received the 2010 Sloan Fellowship, 2010 ONR Young Investigator Award and the 2011 NSF Career Award. After earning his PhD in 2004, Taskar spent 18 months as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California-Berkeley, then spent six years on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania before joining the University of Washington.
Taskar is survived by his wife, Anat Caspi, who holds a PhD in biomedical informatics from Stanford, and daughter, Aviv Taskar.
