John Platt

John Platt is an American computer scientist, born in 1963, who is a Fellow at Google, where he leads the Applied Science branch of Google Research. He worked for Microsoft from 1997 to 2015, latterly as a deputy managing director at Microsoft Research Redmond Labs, and before that he was director of research at Synaptics. Born in Elgin, Illinois, he began university at California State University, Long Beach, at the age of 14 and went on to a computer science doctorate at the California Institute of Technology. In 1998 he invented sequential minimal optimization, a widely used algorithm for speeding up the training of support vector machines, and in 1999 he created Platt scaling, a method that turns support vector machines and other classifiers into probability models. He shared a 2005 Scientific and Technical Achievement Academy Award for work on simulating realistic cloth in motion pictures, and as a student he discovered two asteroids at Palomar Observatory.