Marco Ramoni died at the age of 47 on Tuesday, June 8th in Boston. He had been somewhat ill for weeks, but succumbed quickly to heart failure. He is survived by his widow, Rachel.
Marco's biography is colorful, and long despite those relatively few years he was with us. After a difficult childhood in Italy, his academic career took him from his doctoral work at the University of Pavia to McGill University, to the Open University in Milton Keynes, and finally to Harvard Medical School. Marco was a philosopher, an engineer, a software developer, an entrepreneur, a teacher, and in his spare time, a fiction writer and saxophonist. Marco was at his best when working in collaboration, at once both catalyst and source for intellectually productive and socially satisfying group effort. In his last years, his most visible work applied Bayes nets to genomics and predictive medicine, in projects he undertook together with a distinguished roster of co-workers. Never narrow, Marco also recently attracted media attention for his part in collaborative work to translate biomedical monitoring displays into music - perhaps violins for heartbeats, and clarinets for breaths, and so forth. This is an idea whose initial whimsy is soon overtaken by an appreciation of its tough-minded engineering practicality; a signature Marco project. Marco would have no patience with a note that discussed only work. He lived large, and in that, too, Marco was best in collaboration. He was an absurdly generous host, and always a welcome guest. Whenever death comes at so conspicuously a young age, thoughts of what might have been are inevitable. We can be consoled by how much Marco there actually was, even if there ought to have been decades more. Marco himself gets the last riff, together with his fellow musicians... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUNa9wzLC2k _______________________________________________ uai mailing list uai@ENGR.ORST.EDU https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/uai
