Kirk Borne

“The field of machine learning is concerned with the question of how to construct computer programs that automatically improve with experience.” — from the Preface of “Machine Learning” by Tom Mitchell — download 421-page PDF of this classic ML book here: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~tom/files/MachineLearningTomMitchell.pdf In 1998, when I discovered this book and read that first sentence, I paused, reread it, and pondered “what sort of mathematics is this?” — mathematical algorithms that learn from experience! What?? I had many years of advanced math in physics & astrophysics undergrad and grad schools, but this was a totally new perspective for me. And it redirected the entire trajectory of my career, even now 28 years later. One of the early products of my career redirection was this website that I created and maintained at @NASAGoddard for several years: "Data Mining Resources for Space Science" (shut down in 2002; now preserved on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine): https://web.archive.org/web/20020604035007/http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/adc/adc_datamining.html