Ronald J. Williams (1945 in California – February 16, 2024 in Framingham Massachusetts)[1] was professor of computer science at Northeastern University, and one of the pioneers of neural networks.
He co-authored a paper on the backpropagation algorithm which triggered a boom in neural network research.
[2] He also made fundamental contributions to the fields of recurrent neural networks[3][4] and reinforcement learning.
[5] Together with Wenxu Tong and Mary Jo Ondrechen he developed Partial Order Optimum Likelihood (POOL), a machine learning method used in the prediction of active amino acids in protein structures.
POOL is a maximum likelihood method with a monotonicity constraint and is a general predictor of properties that depend monotonically on the input features.