Highleyman retrospective: https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/1208/thesis.pdf

Papers: https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1960-highleyman.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1961-highleyman.pdf / https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1962-highleyman.pdf (The thesis is not available but I've purchased a ProQuest scan so I'll have it in a month or two... EDIT: here) https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1961-bledsoe.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1961-uhr.pdf Patent: https://www.gwern.net//docs/ai/1961-highleyman-3.pdf Chow attempt: https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1962-chow.pdf Announcement of data: https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1963-highleyman.pdf Munson et al's attempt at beating Highleyman: https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1968-munson.pdf Also: https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1957-chow.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1968-munson.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1968-duda.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/ai/1968-munson-2.pdf

Recht thread: https://twitter.com/beenwrekt/status/1451204032538701824

With a tip from @chrishwiggins, @mrtz and I penned an ode to Highleyman’s data, the first machine learning benchmark dataset. The parallels and extrapolations to the present are uncanny.

...It blows my mind that Bill invented so many powerful machine learning primitives---finding linear functions that minimize empirical risk, gradient descent to minimize the risk, train-test splits, convolutional neural networks---all as part of his PhD dissertation project.

...The most interesting part to me: he considered the machine learning project to be a failure. He (and Bell Labs) realized the computing of 1959 was not up to the task.

After he finished his thesis, Bill abandoned pattern recognition and moved on to work on other cool and practical computer engineering projects that interested him, never once looking back.

By the mid sixties Bill had immersed himself in data communication and transmission, and patented novel approaches to electrolytic printing and financial transaction hardware. He eventually ended up specializing in high-reliability computing.

Though he developed many of the machine learning techniques we use today, he was content to leave the field and work to advance general computing to catch up with his early ideas.

It’s odd but not surprising that while every machine learning class mentions Rosenblatt, Minsky, and Papert, almost no one I’ve spoken with had ever heard of Bill Highleyman.

I worry Bill is no longer reachable as he seems to have no online presence after 2019 and would be 88 years old today. If anyone out there on Twitter has met Bill, I’d love to hear more about him.

And if anyone has any idea of where we can get a copy of his 1800 characters from 1959, please let me know.