Before David won a MacArthur Grant he was a professor at UCSD and co-wrote a few great books on artificial neural networks that really helped me a lot. My company also hired him as a consultant and he gave me advice when I implemented the 12 currently popular neural network learning and recall algorithms in the 1980s for our ANSim software product. It was a great experience sitting in his living room talking about NNs.

He was a nice guy and I am sure that he helped many people with his work.