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David J. C. MacKay

October 17, 2023

Sir David John Cameron MacKay FRS FInstP FICE[3][1] (22 April 1967 – 14 April 2016[4][11]) was a British physicist, mathematician, and academic. He was the Regius Professor of Engineering[12] in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge[13] and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).[14] MacKay wrote the book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air.[7][15][16]

Professor Sir David MacKay

FRS FInstP FICE
Born
David John Cameron MacKay

(1967-04-22)22 April 1967[4][6]
Stoke-on-Trent, England
Died14 April 2016(2016-04-14) (aged 48)
Cambridge, England
Alma mater
Known for
Spouse
Ramesh Ghiassi
​
(m. 2011)​
[10]
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
Institutions
ThesisBayesian methods for adaptive models (1992)
Doctoral advisorJohn Hopfield[5]
Websitewithouthotair.com
www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/mackay
gov.uk/government/people/david-mackay

Education Edit

MacKay was educated at Newcastle High School and represented Britain in the International Physics Olympiad in Yugoslavia in 1985,[17] receiving the first prize for experimental work. He continued his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences (Experimental and theoretical physics) in 1988.[4] He went to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) as a Fulbright Scholar, where his supervisor was John Hopfield.[5] He was awarded a PhD in 1992.[18][19][3]

Career and research Edit

In January 1992 MacKay was appointed the Royal Society Smithson Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge, continuing his cross-disciplinary research in the Cavendish Laboratory, the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge. In 1995 he was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory. He was promoted in 1999 to a Readership, in 2003 to a Professorship in Natural Philosophy and in 2013 to the post of Regius Professorship of Engineering.[20]

MacKay's contributions[21][22][23][24] in machine learning and information theory include the development of Bayesian methods[25] for neural networks,[26] the rediscovery (with Radford M. Neal) of low-density parity-check codes,[8] and the invention of Dasher,[9] a software application for communication especially popular with those who cannot use a traditional keyboard.[27] He cofounded the knowledge management company Transversal.[28] In 2003, his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms[29] was published.

His interests beyond research included the development of effective teaching methods and African development; he taught regularly at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town from its foundation in 2003 to 2006. In 2008 he completed a book on energy consumption and energy production without fossil fuels called Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. MacKay used £10,000 of his own money to publish the book, and the initial print run of 5,000 sold within days.[30] The book received praise from The Economist,[31] The Guardian,[30] and Bill Gates, who called it "one of the best books on energy that has been written."[32][33] Like his textbook on Information theory, MacKay made the book available for free online.[34] In March 2012 he gave a TED talk on renewable energy.[35]

MacKay was appointed to be Chief Scientific Advisor of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, United Kingdom, in September 2009.[14] In October 2014, at the end of his five-year term, he was succeeded by John Loughhead.[36]

Awards and honours Edit

MacKay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.[1] His certificate of election reads:

David MacKay introduced more efficient types of error-correcting code that are now used in satellite communications, digital broadcasting and magnetic recording. He advanced the field of Machine Learning by providing a sound Bayesian foundation for artificial neural networks. Using this foundation, he significantly improved their performance, allowing them to be used for designing new types of steel that are now used in power stations. He used his expertise in information theory to design a widely used interface called "dasher" that allows disabled people to write efficiently using a single finger or head-mounted pointer."[2]

In the 2016 New Year Honours, MacKay was appointed a Knight Bachelor "for services to Scientific Advice in Government and Science Outreach", and therefore granted the title sir.[37][38]

Personal life Edit

David MacKay was born the fifth child of Donald MacCrimmon MacKay and Valerie MacKay.[4] His elder brother Robert S. MacKay FRS (born in 1956) is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick. David was a vegetarian.[39]

He married Ramesh Ghiassi in 2011.[4] They had a son and a daughter.[11]

Illness and death Edit

MacKay was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer (malignant adenocarcinoma) in July 2015,[3] for which he underwent palliative chemotherapy, a process he documented in detail on his public personal blog.[40][41] He died in the afternoon of 14 April 2016.[42][43][44][45] He is survived by his wife and two children.[11]

References Edit

  1. ^ a b c Anon (2009). . London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 17 November 2015. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:

    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --. Archived from the original on 25 September 2015. Retrieved 9 March 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  2. ^ a b Anon (2009). . London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 15 February 2019.
  3. ^ a b c d Longair, Malcolm; Cates, Michael (2017). "Sir David John Cameron MacKay FRS. 22 April 1967 — 14 April 2016". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 63: 443–465. doi:10.1098/rsbm.2017.0013. ISSN 0080-4606.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g "MacKAY, Prof. David John Cameron". Who's Who. Vol. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). Oxford: A & C Black. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  5. ^ a b David J. C. MacKay at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  6. ^ David MacKay (7 February 2010). . web homepage. University of Cambridge. Archived from the original on 16 April 2016. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  7. ^ a b Mackay, David (2009). Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air. UIT Cambridge. ISBN 978-0-9544529-3-3.
  8. ^ a b MacKay, D. J. C.; Neal, R. M. (1996). "Near Shannon limit performance of low density parity check codes". Electronics Letters. 32 (18): 1645. Bibcode:1996ElL....32.1645M. doi:10.1049/el:19961141.
  9. ^ a b Wills, S. A.; MacKay, D. J. C. (2006). "DASHER—An Efficient Writing System for Brain–Computer Interfaces?". IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering. 14 (2): 244–246. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.63.5063. doi:10.1109/TNSRE.2006.875573. PMID 16792304. S2CID 185665.
  10. ^ "Ramesh and David". Rameshanddavid.blogspot.com. 15 January 2011. Retrieved 18 October 2012.
  11. ^ a b c Anon (2016). . The Daily Telegraph. Archived from the original on 17 April 2016.
  12. ^ . Cambridge: University of Cambridge. 28 March 2013. Archived from the original on 3 March 2016.
  13. ^ David MacKay (7 July 2012). "David J.C. MacKay FRS". web homepage. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  14. ^ a b DECC confirms MacKay as new low-carbon advisor, BusinessGreen, 3 September 2009, retrieved 29 December 2011
  15. ^ "Britons of the Year", The Daily Telegraph, London, p. 15, 29 December 2009
  16. ^ "What Will It Take to Save the Earth?" 26 April 2012 by Joel E. Cohen in The New York Review of Books
  17. ^ David MacKay (23 August 2010). "Prof. David J.C. MacKay brief bio sketch". web homepage. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 28 September 2016.
  18. ^ Mackay, David J.C. (1992). Bayesian methods for adaptive models (PhD thesis). California Institute of Technology. OCLC 222439886.
  19. ^ David MacKay (24 June 2010). "Prof. David J.C. MacKay". web homepage. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  20. ^ "David MacKay appointed Regius Professor of Engineering". University of Cambridge. 28 March 2013. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
  21. ^ David J. C. MacKay at DBLP Bibliography Server  
  22. ^ David J. C. MacKay author profile page at the ACM Digital Library
  23. ^ David J. C. MacKay publications indexed by Google Scholar  
  24. ^ David J. C. MacKay publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  25. ^ MacKay, D. J. C. (1992). "A Practical Bayesian Framework for Backpropagation Networks" (PDF). Neural Computation. 4 (3): 448–472. doi:10.1162/neco.1992.4.3.448. S2CID 16543854.
  26. ^ MacKay, D. J. C. (1992). "Bayesian Interpolation". Neural Computation. 4 (3): 415–447. doi:10.1162/neco.1992.4.3.415. S2CID 1762283.
  27. ^ Ward, D. J.; MacKay, D. J. C. (2002). "Artificial intelligence: Fast hands-free writing by gaze direction". Nature. 418 (6900): 838. arXiv:cs/0204030. Bibcode:2002Natur.418..838W. doi:10.1038/418838a. PMID 12192400. S2CID 4430685.
  28. ^ "Transversal Team". Retrieved 27 January 2015.
  29. ^ MacKay, David J. C. (September 2003). Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521642989.
  30. ^ a b Leo Hickman (30 April 2009). "Power to the People". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 January 2011.
  31. ^ "Meltdown". The Economist. 8 April 2009. Retrieved 14 January 2011.
  32. ^ Bill Gates (15 January 2010). . The Gates Notes. Archived from the original on 5 January 2011. Retrieved 14 January 2011.
  33. ^ "YouTube – How Many Light Bulbs? with David MacKay From Cambridge Ideas". YouTube. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021. Retrieved 28 June 2011.
  34. ^ "Sustainable energy - Without the Hot Air". David MacKay FRS. 29 August 2015. Retrieved 2 July 2017.
  35. ^ David MacKay (March 2012). A reality check on renewables. Retrieved 12 October 2012.
  36. ^ DECC appoints new chief scientific advisor
  37. ^ "No. 61450". The London Gazette (Supplement). 30 December 2015. p. N2.
  38. ^ "New Year's Honours 2016 list" (PDF). GOV.UK. 30 December 2015. Retrieved 30 December 2015.
  39. ^ David MacKay (7 February 2010). "David MacKay: Some biographical stuff..." web homepage. University of Cambridge. Retrieved 29 March 2010.
  40. ^ Unexpected signs of malignancy, 27 August 2015
  41. ^ What do you tell the children?, 1 September 2015
  42. ^ Appendix Three- Correspondence, Visitors, and Gifts, 12 April 2016
  43. ^ Mark Lynas (18 April 2016). . The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 19 April 2016.
  44. ^ Athene Donald (2016). . occamstypewriter.org. Archived from the original on 19 April 2016.
  45. ^ Mark Lynas (2016). . Archived from the original on 15 April 2016.

October 17, 2023
david, mackay, david, john, cameron, mackay, finstp, fice, april, 1967, april, 2016, british, physicist, mathematician, academic, regius, professor, engineering, department, engineering, university, cambridge, from, 2009, 2014, chief, scientific, advisor, depa. Sir David John Cameron MacKay FRS FInstP FICE 3 1 22 April 1967 14 April 2016 4 11 was a British physicist mathematician and academic He was the Regius Professor of Engineering 12 in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge 13 and from 2009 to 2014 was Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change DECC 14 MacKay wrote the book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air 7 15 16 Professor Sir David MacKayFRS FInstP FICEBornDavid John Cameron MacKay 1967 04 22 22 April 1967 4 6 Stoke on Trent EnglandDied14 April 2016 2016 04 14 aged 48 Cambridge EnglandAlma materUniversity of Cambridge California Institute of Technology 4 Known forSustainable Energy Without the Hot Air 7 Low density parity check code 8 Dasher 9 SpouseRamesh Ghiassi m 2011 wbr 10 AwardsFRS 2009 1 2 3 FInstP when FICE 4 when Fulbright scholar when Knight Bachelor 2016 Scientific careerFieldsMachine learning Information theory Sustainable energyInstitutionsUniversity of Cambridge California Institute of Technology Department of Energy and Climate ChangeThesisBayesian methods for adaptive models 1992 Doctoral advisorJohn Hopfield 5 Websitewithouthotair wbr com www wbr inference wbr phy wbr cam wbr ac wbr uk wbr mackay gov wbr uk wbr government wbr people wbr david mackay Contents 1 Education 2 Career and research 2 1 Awards and honours 3 Personal life 3 1 Illness and death 4 ReferencesEducation EditMacKay was educated at Newcastle High School and represented Britain in the International Physics Olympiad in Yugoslavia in 1985 17 receiving the first prize for experimental work He continued his education at Trinity College Cambridge and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences Experimental and theoretical physics in 1988 4 He went to the California Institute of Technology Caltech as a Fulbright Scholar where his supervisor was John Hopfield 5 He was awarded a PhD in 1992 18 19 3 Career and research EditIn January 1992 MacKay was appointed the Royal Society Smithson Research Fellow at Darwin College Cambridge continuing his cross disciplinary research in the Cavendish Laboratory the Department of Physics of the University of Cambridge In 1995 he was made a University Lecturer in the Cavendish Laboratory He was promoted in 1999 to a Readership in 2003 to a Professorship in Natural Philosophy and in 2013 to the post of Regius Professorship of Engineering 20 MacKay s contributions 21 22 23 24 in machine learning and information theory include the development of Bayesian methods 25 for neural networks 26 the rediscovery with Radford M Neal of low density parity check codes 8 and the invention of Dasher 9 a software application for communication especially popular with those who cannot use a traditional keyboard 27 He cofounded the knowledge management company Transversal 28 In 2003 his book Information Theory Inference and Learning Algorithms 29 was published His interests beyond research included the development of effective teaching methods and African development he taught regularly at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cape Town from its foundation in 2003 to 2006 In 2008 he completed a book on energy consumption and energy production without fossil fuels called Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air MacKay used 10 000 of his own money to publish the book and the initial print run of 5 000 sold within days 30 The book received praise from The Economist 31 The Guardian 30 and Bill Gates who called it one of the best books on energy that has been written 32 33 Like his textbook on Information theory MacKay made the book available for free online 34 In March 2012 he gave a TED talk on renewable energy 35 MacKay was appointed to be Chief Scientific Advisor of the Department of Energy and Climate Change United Kingdom in September 2009 14 In October 2014 at the end of his five year term he was succeeded by John Loughhead 36 Awards and honours EditMacKay was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society FRS in 2009 1 His certificate of election reads David MacKay introduced more efficient types of error correcting code that are now used in satellite communications digital broadcasting and magnetic recording He advanced the field of Machine Learning by providing a sound Bayesian foundation for artificial neural networks Using this foundation he significantly improved their performance allowing them to be used for designing new types of steel that are now used in power stations He used his expertise in information theory to design a widely used interface called dasher that allows disabled people to write efficiently using a single finger or head mounted pointer 2 In the 2016 New Year Honours MacKay was appointed a Knight Bachelor for services to Scientific Advice in Government and Science Outreach and therefore granted the title sir 37 38 Personal life EditDavid MacKay was born the fifth child of Donald MacCrimmon MacKay and Valerie MacKay 4 His elder brother Robert S MacKay FRS born in 1956 is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick David was a vegetarian 39 He married Ramesh Ghiassi in 2011 4 They had a son and a daughter 11 Illness and death Edit MacKay was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer malignant adenocarcinoma in July 2015 3 for which he underwent palliative chemotherapy a process he documented in detail on his public personal blog 40 41 He died in the afternoon of 14 April 2016 42 43 44 45 He is survived by his wife and two children 11 References Edit a b c Anon 2009 Sir David MacKay FRS London Royal Society Archived from the original on 17 November 2015 One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety org website where All text published under the heading Biography on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4 0 International License Royal Society Terms conditions and policies Archived from the original on 25 September 2015 Retrieved 9 March 2016 a href Template Cite web html title Template Cite web cite web a CS1 maint bot original URL status unknown link a b Anon 2009 Certificate of election EC 2009 27 MacKay David John Cameron London Royal Society Archived from the original on 15 February 2019 a b c d Longair Malcolm Cates Michael 2017 Sir David John Cameron MacKay FRS 22 April 1967 14 April 2016 Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 63 443 465 doi 10 1098 rsbm 2017 0013 ISSN 0080 4606 a b c d e f g MacKAY Prof David John Cameron Who s Who Vol 2016 online Oxford University Press ed Oxford A amp C Black Subscription or UK public library membership required a b David J C MacKay at the Mathematics Genealogy Project David MacKay 7 February 2010 Biography David J C MacKay web homepage University of Cambridge Archived from the original on 16 April 2016 Retrieved 12 October 2012 a b Mackay David 2009 Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air UIT Cambridge ISBN 978 0 9544529 3 3 a b MacKay D J C Neal R M 1996 Near Shannon limit performance of low density parity check codes Electronics Letters 32 18 1645 Bibcode 1996ElL 32 1645M doi 10 1049 el 19961141 a b Wills S A MacKay D J C 2006 DASHER An Efficient Writing System for Brain Computer Interfaces IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering 14 2 244 246 CiteSeerX 10 1 1 63 5063 doi 10 1109 TNSRE 2006 875573 PMID 16792304 S2CID 185665 Ramesh and David Rameshanddavid blogspot com 15 January 2011 Retrieved 18 October 2012 a b c Anon 2016 Professor Sir David MacKay physicist obituary The Daily Telegraph Archived from the original on 17 April 2016 David MacKay appointed Regius Professor of Engineering Cambridge University of Cambridge 28 March 2013 Archived from the original on 3 March 2016 David MacKay 7 July 2012 David J C MacKay FRS web homepage University of Cambridge Retrieved 12 October 2012 a b DECC confirms MacKay as new low carbon advisor BusinessGreen 3 September 2009 retrieved 29 December 2011 Britons of the Year The Daily Telegraph London p 15 29 December 2009 What Will It Take to Save the Earth 26 April 2012 by Joel E Cohen in The New York Review of Books David MacKay 23 August 2010 Prof David J C MacKay brief bio sketch web homepage University of Cambridge Retrieved 28 September 2016 Mackay David J C 1992 Bayesian methods for adaptive models PhD thesis California Institute of Technology OCLC 222439886 David MacKay 24 June 2010 Prof David J C MacKay web homepage University of Cambridge Retrieved 12 October 2012 David MacKay appointed Regius Professor of Engineering University of Cambridge 28 March 2013 Retrieved 3 April 2013 David J C MacKay at DBLP Bibliography Server nbsp David J C MacKay author profile page at the ACM Digital Library David J C MacKay publications indexed by Google Scholar nbsp David J C MacKay publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database subscription required MacKay D J C 1992 A Practical Bayesian Framework for Backpropagation Networks PDF Neural Computation 4 3 448 472 doi 10 1162 neco 1992 4 3 448 S2CID 16543854 MacKay D J C 1992 Bayesian Interpolation Neural Computation 4 3 415 447 doi 10 1162 neco 1992 4 3 415 S2CID 1762283 Ward D J MacKay D J C 2002 Artificial intelligence Fast hands free writing by gaze direction Nature 418 6900 838 arXiv cs 0204030 Bibcode 2002Natur 418 838W doi 10 1038 418838a PMID 12192400 S2CID 4430685 Transversal Team Retrieved 27 January 2015 MacKay David J C September 2003 Information Theory Inference and Learning Algorithms Cambridge Cambridge University Press ISBN 9780521642989 a b Leo Hickman 30 April 2009 Power to the People The Guardian Retrieved 14 January 2011 Meltdown The Economist 8 April 2009 Retrieved 14 January 2011 Bill Gates 15 January 2010 Clear Thinking on the Topic of Energy The Gates Notes Archived from the original on 5 January 2011 Retrieved 14 January 2011 YouTube How Many Light Bulbs with David MacKay From Cambridge Ideas YouTube Archived from the original on 21 December 2021 Retrieved 28 June 2011 Sustainable energy Without the Hot Air David MacKay FRS 29 August 2015 Retrieved 2 July 2017 David MacKay March 2012 A reality check on renewables Retrieved 12 October 2012 DECC appoints new chief scientific advisor No 61450 The London Gazette Supplement 30 December 2015 p N2 New Year s Honours 2016 list PDF GOV UK 30 December 2015 Retrieved 30 December 2015 David MacKay 7 February 2010 David MacKay Some biographical stuff web homepage University of Cambridge Retrieved 29 March 2010 Unexpected signs of malignancy 27 August 2015 What do you tell the children 1 September 2015 Appendix Three Correspondence Visitors and Gifts 12 April 2016 Mark Lynas 18 April 2016 Sir David MacKay obituary The Guardian London Archived from the original on 19 April 2016 Athene Donald 2016 RIP Sir David MacKay occamstypewriter org Archived from the original on 19 April 2016 Mark Lynas 2016 What David MacKay taught me and taught us all Archived from the original on 15 April 2016 Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title David J C MacKay amp oldid 1169042235, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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