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. In 1995 he was appointed Professor of Computer Science and Statistics at Royal Holloway, University of London. At AT&T Bell Labs (later Shannon Labs) from 1991 through 2001?, 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. He is currently at NEC Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and also Columbia University, New York, New York.

In 2006, Vapnik was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

[edit] 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