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 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.

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