Vladimir Vapnik

Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is one of the main developers of Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory. He was born in the Soviet Union; received a master's degree in mathematics from the Uzbek State University in Samarkand (now Uzbekistan), in 1958; and received a Ph.D in statistics from the Institute of Control Science in Moscow in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 until 1990, and became Head of the Computer Science Research Department. At the end of 1990, he moved to the USA, and joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. The group later became the Image Processing Research Department of AT&T Laboratories when AT&T spun off Lucent Technologies in 1996. Vapnik Left AT&T In 2002 and joined NEC Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, where he currently works in the Machine Learning group. He also holds a Professor of Computer Science and Statistics position at Royal Holloway, University of London since 1995, as well as an Adjunct Professor position at Columbia University, New York, New York since 2003. In 2006, Vapnik was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

While at AT&T, Vapnik and his colleagues developed the theory of the support vector machine. They demonstrated its performance on a number of problems of interest to the machine learning community, including handwriting recognition.

Writings

 * On the uniform convergence of relative frequencies of events to their probabilities, co-author A. Y. Chervonenkis, 1971
 * "Necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniform convergence of means to their expectations, co-author A. Y. Chervonenkis, 1981
 * Estimation of Dependences Based on Empirical Data, 1982
 * The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory, 1995
 * Statistical Learning Theory, 1998
 * Estimation of Dependences Based on Empirical Data, Reprint 2006 (Springer), also contains a philosophical essay on Empirical Inference Science, 2006