Ronald J. Williams

Ronald J. Williams (1945 in California – February 16, 2024 in Framingham Massachusetts)^[1] was professor of computer science at Northeastern University, and one of the pioneers of neural networks. He co-authored a paper on the backpropagation algorithm which triggered a boom in neural network research.^[2] He also made fundamental contributions to the fields of recurrent neural networks^[3][4] and reinforcement learning.^[5] Together with Wenxu Tong and Mary Jo Ondrechen he developed Partial Order Optimum Likelihood (POOL), a machine learning method used in the prediction of active amino acids in protein structures. POOL is a maximum likelihood method with a monotonicity constraint and is a general predictor of properties that depend monotonically on the input features.^[6]