It's in the final stages of publication — I've seen an editor's print in its final form — although I'm not sure what will happen to it now. I would guess it will still be published.
can someone re-edit the title to change "Csail" back to "CSAIL", the way i had it in the first place? a moderator must have incorrectly edited the title, because "Csail" is incorrect.
> a moderator must have incorrectly edited the title, because "Csail" is incorrect.
It's not a human moderator, it's the ALGORITHM (TM)! It seems Hacker News has a capitalization algorithm that automatically capitalizes the title to proper news headlines.
Most of the time it works well, but sometimes it would ruin intentional caps and it's pretty annoying. And mysteriously, it doesn't always trigger for all titles, it must have a set of hardcoded pattern-matching code.
Very sad, he was an amazing teacher. I love his MIT 6.034 lectures on youtube. One of the best is the SVM lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_PwhiWxHK8o -- it's awesome how he gives the lecture to completion without any notes.
RIP Professor
Best teacher I've ever had, he let me audit all his classes and took me/my ideas seriously at all times. And would grade my papers even though I was never an official student, or his his words "a paying customer."
First Minsky now Patrick. RIP and perhaps they are both back in touch. ;(
Instead of thinking about how they are both back in touch, why not assume a step further. They are in touch, and they are hoping that you are doing _______ with the most passion [in which they have yet to witness ;)].
Now fill that in and use it as adrenaline to accomplish your next (big, relatively) feat.
I prefer to view it as an opportunity to attempt to fill the big shoes that are now sitting empty, and hopefully do good in the world in the process, even if we don't manage to fully fill the big shoes.
And then maybe even inspiring the next generation, thus continuing the cycle.
It feels meaningful to me and doesn't require any big assumptions :)
I only had a few hallway conversations with him, but they were always delightful and I always walked away having learned something new. He was a good scholar and an admirable human being. RIP.
This makes me very sad. Patrick H. Winston was a brilliant man and a very nice person. He was my student advisor at MIT and agreed to serve on the advisory board of a startup company I founded. I had the privilege of meeting him again at his lab a few years back. He was still doing leading edge research and had tremendous enthusiasm for his work and his students. He will definitely be missed.
You have been extremely lucky. I only had him for 6.034 and the overall encouragement he gave me and so many other students. Solving death simply must be a higher priority.
RIP Pat Winston - he infuriated me the most when he said something so obviously true and which I wanted to be false. One example: "No one will ever read your paper in entirety, so write for the skimmers." As much as I loved his technical lectures, I especially remembered his peripheral aphorisms.
But he said one thing that I immediately agreed with (conceptually) and have recalled at many hard times in my life: "Perhaps we will look back on even this with fondness." (But in Latin, because Pat Winston)
Patrick Henry Winston cared so much about students.
He wouldn't just spend time crafting lectures (which you can see on OCW), but even spent time re-designing the course to try to improve learning and remove focus on the grades[0].
When students needed help, he was always by their side. When the Star Simpson events were taking place, PHW helped institute policies to better support students[1].
He was a true character. I pieced together a Twitter thread to try to show a glimpse of his personality[2]. MIT will not be the same without him.
(Disclaimer: PHW was my academic advisor for 5 years)
I only met him in passing when at MIT but some of my colleagues worked more closely with him. Everything I've heard is absolutely true. People sometimes get cynical and believe that nice people can't be that nice (á la Mr. Rogers), but he really was that kind.
I think the thing that speaks the most to his personality is how the brief friendship he struck up with Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas [0]:
> Will likes to see stuff at MIT whenever he is in town. This time I took him to see robots in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, wearable computing in the Media Lab, and miscellaneous cool stuff in the Precision Engineering Research Group. It wasn't hard to find people to help out.
> We walked around for three hours. Then, he was off to do soundchecks. A few hours after he learned about energy-storing inverse lakes, he and his Black Eyed Peas played to a sold-out crowd at the TD Banknorth Garden.
> I always like amazing people, like Will, who is highly creative, does interesting things, and is interested in the future. MIT attracts amazing, highly creative, interesting, interested people like honey attracts bears.
> And on top of all that, Will is a fan of my field, Artificial Intelligence. Check out the Peas Imma Be Rocking That Body video.
> Anyway, when Will and his entourage were about to leave, and all the obligatory pictures were taken, he asked, as he generally does, if I could use a few tickets for the show. “Hey, that would be great,” I said. I like the Peas, and besides, I hadn't been to a good concert since the Rolling Stones were in town in '06.
> Alas, my daughter seized the tickets. “You're nowhere near cool enough to go,” she said, “and I have some friends.” Maybe I should find a new place to buy clothes.
i wonder what it must feel like at mit with two of its titans gone (minksy and winston). are there others stepping in their place? abelson and sussman are still there. in a world where machine learning has taken over "ai", it doesn't feel there are many left who have the ability and interest in researching general artificial intelligence.
They are there, but they're largely marginalized by the newcomers. I think the deeper problems -- than ML taking over AI -- is the commitment to students, to scientific integrity, and to substance over hype and self-promotion.
Up until around five years ago, the course 6.034 had a Fall version and a Spring version. They were substantially different. In the Fall it was taught by Patrick Winston, and in the Spring it was taught by other professors who were 10-20 years younger than Winston.
It's my understanding that the Spring professors really disagreed with the content in the Fall version. It was too old-school AI and they believed it was a disservice to students to teach them AI in that way. I believe they marginalized Winston.
To be honest, I cannot tell if they are right or wrong. I am not familiar with the curriculum in Winston's 6.034. How much does it look like an AI textbook from the 90s? I know that he included topics such as SVM, which is, relative to Winston, newer AI.
But, in any case, I do wish that the two philosophies didn't butt heads. Especially because I have no doubt that Winston's course was better organized, and had more enjoyable lectures.
I think this sentiment certainly existed among some of the younger CSAIL professors- in fact I interviewed for a UROP once with an unnamed professor and they asked "what related classes have you taken so far?" And as soon as I said 6.034 (before I could even finish the list) they said "I'm sure that class is fun but so is a cooking class, it isn't relevant here".
But I'd like to think it wasn't the prevailing sentiment in the department. I actually think a little bit of it stemmed from jealousy about the student praise PHW received. Because I know plenty of students that are now doing more "modern" or "hardcore" ML research that praise 6.034 highly.
It's true that 6.034 did not teach enough math to jump right into theory research, and it's true it didn't teach enough modern implementation to go right into an industry application. But it certainly didn't look like a textbook from the 90s! Professor Winston reworked the course a little bit every year. He gave excellent lectures on the concepts behind deep learning and reinforcement learning. He brought in current professors to present their research goals almost every Friday.
It covered plenty of modern topics, just in a more abstract sense. Which is perfect for an intro course, especially one that is taken by not just CS students but those from many departments (even graduate students in architecture, business, etc.). I think it's so helpful to start with understanding these concepts and then work through the details, rather than start in the weeds like many other courses do.
He did also spend time covering older concepts, which are still good to know, especially when presented through the lense of the history of the field (in academia and business). That's just not something available in any other courses that I'm aware of. Same thing with his amazing communication advice and his sharing of interesting biology, psychology, and neuroscience research.
I sincerely hope 6.034 will continue on somehow in the spirit of the original course. It was inspiring to many students, with life/career lessons that are memorable well beyond school. MIT has plenty of good more traditional ML courses, as do many schools. What I haven't heard of elsewhere is something like 6.034. It was one thing that made MIT unique I think.
Anyway, that is rambly, but I just wanted to defend not only the execution, but the philosophy of 034 (or my take on it anyway, can't speak for PHW). And I hope that the minority that dislikes it doesn't try to take over the course now.
I was very privileged to meet both Prof. Winston and Prof. Josh Tenenbaum briefly a couple of years ago. This brought home to me the plurality and strength of the MIT faculty. There are many amazing people at CSAIL, some of them are focused on specific issues of engineering, maths or neuroscience, but there are still a core of people (Prof. Tenenbaum is not alone in this) who I think are looking very widely and deeply at fundamental issues of cognition and mind.
I only ever "knew" him from the OCW lectures on Youtube, but he seemed like a real class act. And certainly a major contributor to the advancement of CS and AI. He will be missed.
His first AI book, along with Bertram Raphael’s book Mind Inside Matter, were the two books that got me charged up about AI and changed my career and my life.
RIP, my first intro to Winston was when I was a lad in high schools and got the LISP book that also goes by the name "Winston & Horn" Still an excellent LISP book.
I'm very saddened by this loss. I took him for both 6.034 (artificial intelligence) and his survey course 6.803 (the human intelligence enterprise). Some memories:
1. I still use VSNC (you can read more about it here: http://blog.pptstar.com/?p=441) as a simple model for delivering technical talks. As a coincidence I has already been planning on giving a meta talk about this to my team next Friday. He cared more about, and spoke more about, presentation skills than every other lecturer I had at MIT, combined.
2. He was also the only professor I heard speak about the value of leadership skills and how they can be cultivated.
3. He really did care about his students. I remember his saying to help us get over imposter syndrome, "At MIT, 5% of students think it's too easy, 10% of students think it's just right, and 85% think that at any moment they're going to be found out."
4. I still remember his definition of intelligence as something you almost understand. He would tell the story of giving a preview of an upcoming lecture where they would write a program to do differential calculus. A student came up to him and said "There is no way a computer could ever do that!" After the lecture the same student came up to him and said "That wasn't really AI. The program just does it the way I do it!"
I wanted to attend MIT since i was ten, though sadly it didnt happen for me (because of choices)
But one thing is that i am always amazed (and saddened) on HN when i hear about the death of a pillar of our industry whom i had never previously known about.
His style is easy to understand, though in that video the conclusions he comes to about reasoning and language symbols and vision are pretty poor, I’d have thought even in 2010 MIT would have been farther along at least.
85 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] threadhttps://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/favorites.html
Was this ever finished?
It's in the final stages of publication — I've seen an editor's print in its final form — although I'm not sure what will happen to it now. I would guess it will still be published.
It's not a human moderator, it's the ALGORITHM (TM)! It seems Hacker News has a capitalization algorithm that automatically capitalizes the title to proper news headlines.
Most of the time it works well, but sometimes it would ruin intentional caps and it's pretty annoying. And mysteriously, it doesn't always trigger for all titles, it must have a set of hardcoded pattern-matching code.
He had more patience for me than I deserved.
Now fill that in and use it as adrenaline to accomplish your next (big, relatively) feat.
Your thoughts?
RIP PW
I would like to consider this and get back to you
And then maybe even inspiring the next generation, thus continuing the cycle.
It feels meaningful to me and doesn't require any big assumptions :)
How did he die?
But he said one thing that I immediately agreed with (conceptually) and have recalled at many hard times in my life: "Perhaps we will look back on even this with fondness." (But in Latin, because Pat Winston)
Fantastic advice!
He wouldn't just spend time crafting lectures (which you can see on OCW), but even spent time re-designing the course to try to improve learning and remove focus on the grades[0].
When students needed help, he was always by their side. When the Star Simpson events were taking place, PHW helped institute policies to better support students[1].
He was a true character. I pieced together a Twitter thread to try to show a glimpse of his personality[2]. MIT will not be the same without him.
(Disclaimer: PHW was my academic advisor for 5 years)
[0]: http://web.mit.edu/fnl/volume/204/winston.html [1]: http://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/star.html [2]: https://twitter.com/futurekennysf/status/1152262290642788362
I think the thing that speaks the most to his personality is how the brief friendship he struck up with Will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas [0]:
> Will likes to see stuff at MIT whenever he is in town. This time I took him to see robots in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, wearable computing in the Media Lab, and miscellaneous cool stuff in the Precision Engineering Research Group. It wasn't hard to find people to help out.
> We walked around for three hours. Then, he was off to do soundchecks. A few hours after he learned about energy-storing inverse lakes, he and his Black Eyed Peas played to a sold-out crowd at the TD Banknorth Garden.
> I always like amazing people, like Will, who is highly creative, does interesting things, and is interested in the future. MIT attracts amazing, highly creative, interesting, interested people like honey attracts bears.
> And on top of all that, Will is a fan of my field, Artificial Intelligence. Check out the Peas Imma Be Rocking That Body video.
> Anyway, when Will and his entourage were about to leave, and all the obligatory pictures were taken, he asked, as he generally does, if I could use a few tickets for the show. “Hey, that would be great,” I said. I like the Peas, and besides, I hadn't been to a good concert since the Rolling Stones were in town in '06.
> Alas, my daughter seized the tickets. “You're nowhere near cool enough to go,” she said, “and I have some friends.” Maybe I should find a new place to buy clothes.
RIP.
[0] https://people.csail.mit.edu/phw/favorites.html
"Mutual respect is the stuff from which great education emerges."
It's my understanding that the Spring professors really disagreed with the content in the Fall version. It was too old-school AI and they believed it was a disservice to students to teach them AI in that way. I believe they marginalized Winston.
To be honest, I cannot tell if they are right or wrong. I am not familiar with the curriculum in Winston's 6.034. How much does it look like an AI textbook from the 90s? I know that he included topics such as SVM, which is, relative to Winston, newer AI.
But, in any case, I do wish that the two philosophies didn't butt heads. Especially because I have no doubt that Winston's course was better organized, and had more enjoyable lectures.
But I'd like to think it wasn't the prevailing sentiment in the department. I actually think a little bit of it stemmed from jealousy about the student praise PHW received. Because I know plenty of students that are now doing more "modern" or "hardcore" ML research that praise 6.034 highly.
It's true that 6.034 did not teach enough math to jump right into theory research, and it's true it didn't teach enough modern implementation to go right into an industry application. But it certainly didn't look like a textbook from the 90s! Professor Winston reworked the course a little bit every year. He gave excellent lectures on the concepts behind deep learning and reinforcement learning. He brought in current professors to present their research goals almost every Friday.
It covered plenty of modern topics, just in a more abstract sense. Which is perfect for an intro course, especially one that is taken by not just CS students but those from many departments (even graduate students in architecture, business, etc.). I think it's so helpful to start with understanding these concepts and then work through the details, rather than start in the weeds like many other courses do.
He did also spend time covering older concepts, which are still good to know, especially when presented through the lense of the history of the field (in academia and business). That's just not something available in any other courses that I'm aware of. Same thing with his amazing communication advice and his sharing of interesting biology, psychology, and neuroscience research.
I sincerely hope 6.034 will continue on somehow in the spirit of the original course. It was inspiring to many students, with life/career lessons that are memorable well beyond school. MIT has plenty of good more traditional ML courses, as do many schools. What I haven't heard of elsewhere is something like 6.034. It was one thing that made MIT unique I think.
Anyway, that is rambly, but I just wanted to defend not only the execution, but the philosophy of 034 (or my take on it anyway, can't speak for PHW). And I hope that the minority that dislikes it doesn't try to take over the course now.
R.I.P., Mr. Winston.
Patrick Winston will be missed.
1. I still use VSNC (you can read more about it here: http://blog.pptstar.com/?p=441) as a simple model for delivering technical talks. As a coincidence I has already been planning on giving a meta talk about this to my team next Friday. He cared more about, and spoke more about, presentation skills than every other lecturer I had at MIT, combined.
2. He was also the only professor I heard speak about the value of leadership skills and how they can be cultivated.
3. He really did care about his students. I remember his saying to help us get over imposter syndrome, "At MIT, 5% of students think it's too easy, 10% of students think it's just right, and 85% think that at any moment they're going to be found out."
4. I still remember his definition of intelligence as something you almost understand. He would tell the story of giving a preview of an upcoming lecture where they would write a program to do differential calculus. A student came up to him and said "There is no way a computer could ever do that!" After the lecture the same student came up to him and said "That wasn't really AI. The program just does it the way I do it!"
especially love #4
But one thing is that i am always amazed (and saddened) on HN when i hear about the death of a pillar of our industry whom i had never previously known about.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUl4u3cNGP63gFHB6xb-k...
I find his presentation style is not only clear, but relaxing. It's like a friendly sermon or something.