Richard Neapolitan
American mathematician
Richard Eugene Neapolitan was an American scientist. Neapolitan is most well-known for his role in establishing the use of probability theory in artificial intelligence and in the development of the field Bayesian networks.
Biography
Neapolitan grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Westchester, Illinois, which is a western suburb of Chicago. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Neapolitan notes that he was unable to obtain an academic position after obtaining his Ph.D., owing to a glut of mathematicians and a recession in the 1970s, and so he worked as a model and in various computer science related positions. The latter experience enabled him to obtain a faculty position in the Computer Science Department of Northeastern Illinois University (NEIU) in 1980. He served the majority of his academic career at NEIU, including becoming Chair of Computer Science in 2002.
He died on January 29, 2020, due to cancer.
Research
In the 1980s, researchers from cognitive science (e.g., Judea Pearl), computer science (e.g., Peter C. Cheeseman and Lotfi Zadeh), decision analysis (e.g., Ross Shachter), medicine (e.g., David Heckerman and Gregory Cooper), mathematics and statistics (e.g., Neapolitan, Tod Levitt, and David Spiegelhalter) and philosophy (e.g., Henry Kyburg) met at the newly formed Workshop on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence to discuss how to best perform uncertain inference in artificial intelligence. Neapolitan presented an exposition on the use of the classical approach to probability versus the Bayesian approach in artificial intelligence at the 1988 Workshop.
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