George Moody

[PhysioNet Challenge]

Dear Challengers,

Many of you have probably already heard, but this past weekend, we lost the force behind the PhysioNet Challenges, George Moody, to COVID-19. 

A tribute to him has been posted on PhysioNet here:

https://physionet.org/news/post/355

You can also read more about George's background prior to the creation of the Challenges here: http://reylab.bidmc.harvard.edu/people/George.html 

George devoted much of his research time, from 1999 to 2014, to the Challenges. He single-handedly ran them, innovating public data science competitions over a decade before Kaggle started. It takes a team to do what George used to do part time! His impact cannot be understated, and his innovative approaches and thoughtful design permeate the Challenge still today. My first experience of George was at the 2002 Challenge, where he had designed an elegant scoring system. There were two Challenge tracks - one to create an artificial model of multiscale physiology, and one to identify whether data was generated from a model or a real person. You had to enter the second Challenge if you entered the first, and as a consequence he generated a crowd-sourced score for the first Challenge track.  

George was a fountain of information and kindness for us all. He will be greatly missed.

I hope we'll be able to meet in person at CinC 2021 and celebrate George's life together. 

Many of us are here because of him.

-Gari

(On behalf of the PhysioNet and PhysioNet Challenge team.)

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https://PhysioNetChallenges.org

www.PhysioNet.org