Ben Taskar

Ben Taskar (March 3, 1977 – November 18, 2013) was a professor and researcher in the area of machine learning and applications to computational linguistics and computer vision. He was a Magerman Term Associate Professor for Computer and Information Science at University of Pennsylvania. He co-directed PRiML: Penn Research in Machine Learning, a joint venture between the School of Engineering and Wharton. He was also a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Annenberg Center for Public Policy. At the University of Washington, he held the Boeing Professorship.

He was the first person to define Max-margin Markov networks and a pioneer in statistical relational learning.

Ben Taskar died of an apparent heart attack on the night of November 17, 2013, at the age of 36.