Vladimir Vapnik

Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (Russian: Владимир Наумович Вапник) is one of the main developers of Vapnik-Chervonenkis theory. He was born in the Soviet Union. He received his master's degree in mathematics at the Uzbek State University, Samarkand, Uzbek SSR in 1958 and Ph.D in statistics at the Institute of Control Sciences, Moscow in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 to 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 City since 2003. He was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2006.

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.

[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