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Ryszard S. Michalski, a George Mason University professor whose research helped shape the field of machine learning, bringing computers closer to the realm of human thought, died Sept. 20 of cancer at his home in Fairfax County. He was 70.

By Matt Schudel, Washington Post, October 1, 2007

While working in his native Poland in the 1960s, Dr. Michalski devised an early computer system that could recognize handwriting. After coming to the United States in 1970, he expanded the field of machine learning, creating applications in which computers could execute a form of reasoning, drawing conclusions from information supplied to them.

"He was a pioneer in this field," said James S. Trefil, a GMU physicist and writer.

Dr. Michalski's specialty of machine learning is similar to but distinct from artificial intelligence. The underlying purpose of much of his work was to use computers to recognize patterns that could ease the decision-making process in seemingly unrelated systems. His research has been applied to agriculture, medicine, the stock market, fraud protection and voice recognition systems, among other things.

In 1997, he developed an influential computational system he called the Learnable Evolution Model, in which a machine's problem-solving capability increases in a clearly directed process, rather than by random increments.

Previously, the evolution of a machine's computational ability proceeded in a slow, fitful manner similar to Darwinian evolution in biology. With Dr. Michalski's advances, machines could guide their capacity to compute by rejecting variables that slowed their ability to process information.

Dr. Michalski likened his Learnable Evolution Model to the genetic engineering of agricultural plants, in which elements can be added or withdrawn to produce an optimal crop.

For many years, Dr. Michalski directed GMU's Machine Learning and Inference Laboratory. He was a co-author of a multivolume textbook, "Machine Learning: An Artificial Intelligence Approach," and was a co-author or editor of more than 15 other books. He wrote more than 500 technical papers.

He was a co-founder of Machine Learning journal and lectured around the world. He held visiting professorships at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Wisconsin as well as at universities in Europe.

"He was a scholar of international repute," said James E. Gentle, a GMU professor of computational statistics. "He was one of the leading scholars at George Mason."

Several months ago, Dr. Michalski became the founding director of George Mason's Center for Discovery Science and Health Informatics. The purpose of the center is to apply the theories of machine learning to medicine. Ultimately, it was hoped that a computer could use data about a patient to make a medical diagnosis.

"Most computing is computation," Gentle said. "This is more like reasoning."

Dr. Michalski was born in the Polish town of Kalusz, which later became part of Russia, Germany and, finally, Ukraine. He received his undergraduate education at the Krakow and Warsaw universities of technology and a master's degree from the St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University in Russia. In 1969, he received a doctorate in computer science from the Silesian University of Technology in Poland.

He was a research scientist at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw before coming to the United States in 1970 to take a faculty position at the University of Illinois. (At that time, he changed his middle name from Stanislas to Spencer.) He came to George Mason, bringing his research group with him, in 1988.

Dr. Michalski was a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and received his homeland's Order of Merit. From 1987 to 1990, an exhibition that he developed, "Robots and Beyond: The Age of Intelligent Machines," toured museums throughout the United States.

He was well known in Washington's Polish-American community and was a talented piano player who sometimes performed at nursing homes. He also loved to play Polish and Russian songs on the accordion at parties. In his youth, he was a ski instructor in Poland.

"He was not just a scientist," Trefil said. "He read widely. We went to the opera together. He went to all the plays at George Mason. He was the life of the party."

Survivors include his wife of 19 years, Elizabeth Marchut-Michalski of Fairfax County; his mother, Eugenia Michalski of Vienna, Austria; a brother; and a sister.

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