For those who might not know, Hal Daumé III is a highly respected researcher in machine learning, spending a lot of time working in Natural Language Processing

For those who might not know, Hal Daumé III is a highly respected researcher in machine learning, spending a lot of time working in Natural Language Processing (NLP). He also contributes his knowledge to many interesting open source projects. After creating an algorithm called SEARN for solving hard structured prediction problems, Daumé et al. went and created a practical and open implementation of the algorithm in Vowpal Wabbit, an online machine learning library built for speed and used at Yahoo and Microsoft Research amongst other places. He's the sort of academic who contributes not just to theory, but also to practice. Browsing through his publications gives an idea of his contributions[1]. Given all that, I'm looking forward to his take on machine learning and for another valuable resource to be available to everyone. [1]: http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~hal/publications.html http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~hal/publications.html