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March 9, 2017

David and I were neighbors and best friends in New Orleans.  This picture was taken in December 1969 I believe at one of my birthday parties.  I'm shocked to have just learned of his passing.  We had some great times when we were kids.

October 10, 2014

Dave loved the game of soccer!  I had the fortune of capturing this moment of joy between Dave and his son Josh during a fun game a few years ago (2008).

October 10, 2014

Over the last few days I have been thinking a lot about the time that I was Dave's post-doc. I changed to a somewhat different research field since then, but I always imagined meeting him again at a conference where we would chat about what we had been doing since. I am very sad that that will not going to happen.

I remember arriving in Rochester for my new job, together with my (since a few weeks) ‘dependent alien’ husband Andries, while our luggage got lost somewhere on the way and being somewhat shocked about the basement where everybody was working without any windows!?! Dave seemed to be happy enough though. Who needs windows when you can talk and think about cue combination and modelling, when you can write, program and simply get to the bottom of anything that needs to be figured out! I was very happy to work with someone that smart, that dedicated to science and so completely uninterested in trivial things like status and citations. He also wanted us students and post-docs to feel at home, and organized Friday afternoon drinks where we discussed religion and politics. For Andries and me, the opportunity to work in Dave’s lab also gave us the interesting experience to live in the US for a while and to explore the beautiful surroundings. I have very fond memories of a weekend in January 2007 when Dave invited CVS at a house somewhere in the snow. I don’t remember exactly where it was, but I do remember Dave’s warm hospitality (we were allowed to smuggle in a friend from the astrophysics department), playing games in the evening, cross-country skiing and trying out snow shoes for the first time in my life. We had a lot of fun, and I am sure Dave too, even though he could not stop himself from spending some time to work during this weekend as well!

bowling for peace

October 9, 2014

I first met Dave Knill in graduate school at Brown, and from his first day there he was every bit the warm, funny, bright and eager person that everyone has described. He wasn't really an activist type, but we heard about a fundraiser to help build a hospital in Nicaragua and decided to help out. They called it "bowling for peace", and we got people to sponsor us so that the better we bowled, the more we raised. When we got to the bowling alley, we discovered it was 9 pin bowling, which neither of us had ever done. It's hard!

Needless to say, we both bowled horribly and didn't raise much money for the hospital from our scores, so we had to kick in more of our own money to cover our shame. But, like with everything involving Dave Knill, it was fun and funny and made a memory that I still treasure.

October 8, 2014

Just like many other great scientific minds, he was sometimes absentminded.

I was in a meeting with Dave at the lab, when his phone rang an alarm signal. Dave checked the phone and said, “Sorry, I forgot that I had a meeting. I have to go.” And, he went out in a hurry. Less than a minute later, he came back to the lab with a smile in his face. He said, “It was a meeting with you.”

Dave as a Teaching Assistant

October 8, 2014

This is the very Dave I first met in 1988, when I arrived from Beijing as a first year grad student at Brown University's Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences.  This picture of Dave, 26 years ago, brings tears to my eyes, because this was the beginning of our many years of collaboration and friendship. 

At the time, Dave shared an office with Mike Rossen in the second floor, first door on the right at the entrance.  As a senior grad student, he gave me an impression of thinking about and researching on problems in a world way deeper than mine as a first year student.  In fact, I thought that he was a young professor at first.

One of the first courses I took was Computational Vision by Heinrich Buelthoff, using Mac computers and Lisp, and Dave was our TA (teaching assistant).  In the first class, Dave offered his home phone number to the class (but asked us not to call before 10am in weekends or after 11pm), in addition to his office phone number.  This was unusally kind, and we students took an immediate liking of him.  

For some reason, the lab session was in the evening in the computer science building, probably because the high demand of computer labs.  Dave was sitting at the front desk, ready to answer questions, while we students were programming for our assignment.  In the first lab session, Dave also brought a radio with him, listening to some live sport, obviously a big fan.

I happened to have a question, so I went up to him, and timidly apologized for distracting him from the radio.  I was timid also because I was new to the country, and not confident with my English.  Dave waved off the radio by saying "don't worry about it," and put me at immediate ease by giving me a big smile.  It was a relaxed, hearty smile that I have seen so many times ever since, in the years we interacted together.  It was the beginning of our frienship, and I never forget the kind smile.

(One reason Dave immediately impressed me was that he was thinking computationally, and was able to formulate his thoughts in statistical terms, as evident by the equations on the blackboard behind him.  I think that those were Dave's handwriting.)

 

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