Ode to My Father, A Pioneer in Machine Learning

Olivia Love
2 min readSep 8, 2024

This is dedicated to my father, who passed away in 2020 after a protracted battle with colon cancer.

Photo by author

In the shadow of languages, where words.

whisper and dance like wind through olive leaves,

Father, you tirelessly navigated the labyrinth of tongues,

seeking to codify meaning and speech,

to find common roots and connections,

to harness language’s rules and harvest them.

You did not fear the foreign voice,

the tangled syntax, the fractured phrase —

for in your heart burned the fire of Babel,

the yearning to unite what was broken,

to bridge the chasm between souls with code.

You saw in each dialect the shimmer of truth,

the hidden light of understanding,

and with a scientist’s ear, you listened deeply,

not to what was said, but to what was meant.

In the silence between words, you found the key,

unlocking the secrets of human communication.

with algorithms that sang the songs of many, that could dissolve barriers.

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