Platt was born in
Elgin, Illinois, and matriculated at
California State University, Long Beach, at the age of 14. After graduating from CSULB at the age of 18, he enrolled in a computer science PhD program at
California Institute of Technology. While a student at Caltech under astronomer
Gene Shoemaker, he discovered two asteroids,
3259 Brownlee and
3237 Victorplatt at
Palomar Observatory on 25 September 1984. The latter he named after his father Victor Platt, while the former was named by Gene Shoemaker. Shoemaker allowed Platt to name one of his discoveries,
3927 Feliciaplatt, which he named after his mother. In 1998, Platt invented
sequential minimal optimization, a widely used algorithm for speeding up the training of
support vector machines, which fixed the issue that
quadratic programming brought to early machine learning techniques. In 1999, Platt continued his work into support vector machines, creating
Platt scaling, a method to turn SVMs (and other classifiers) into probability models. In August 2005,
Apple Computer had its application for a
patent on the interface of the popular
iPod music player rejected by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office. The reason appears to be that Platt had submitted a patent application for a similar interface design five months prior to Apple's claim. Platt shared a 2005 Scientific and Technical Achievement Oscar from the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with
Demetri Terzopoulos for their pioneering work in physically-based computer-generated techniques used to simulate realistic cloth in motion pictures. ==References==