Radford M. Neal (born September 12, 1956) is a professor emeritus at the Department of Statistics and Department of Computer Science at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public university, public research university whose main campus is located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park (Toronto), Queen's Park in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It was founded by ...

, where he held a Canada research chair in

statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of data. In applying statistics to a s ...

and

machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of Computational statistics, statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform Task ( ...

Education and career

Neal studied computer science at the

University of Calgary {{Infobox university , name = University of Calgary , image = University of Calgary coat of arms without motto scroll.svg , image_size = 150px , caption = Coat of arms , former ...

, where he received his B.Sc. in 1977 and M.Sc. in 1980, with thesis work supervised by David Hill. He worked for several years as a sessional instructor at the

and as a statistical consultant in the industry before coming back to the academia. Neal continued his study at the

, where he received his Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". Hinton is Univer ...

. Neal became an assistant professor at the

in 1995, an associated professor in 1999 and a full professor since 2001. He was the

Canada Research Chair Canada Research Chair (CRC) is a title given to certain Canadian university research professors by the Canada Research Chairs Program. Program goals The Canada Research Chair program was established in 2000 as a part of the Government of Canada ...

in Statistics and Machine Learning from 2003 to 2016 and retired in 2017. Neal has made great contributions in the area of

and

, where he is particularly well known for his work on

Markov chain Monte Carlo In statistics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a class of algorithms used to draw samples from a probability distribution. Given a probability distribution, one can construct a Markov chain whose elements' distribution approximates it – that ...

error correcting codes In computing, telecommunication, information theory, and coding theory, forward error correction (FEC) or channel coding is a technique used for controlling errors in data transmission over unreliable or noisy communication channels. The centra ...

and

Bayesian learning Bayesian inference ( or ) is a method of statistical inference in which Bayes' theorem is used to calculate a probability of a hypothesis, given prior evidence, and update it as more information becomes available. Fundamentally, Bayesian inferen ...

for

neural networks A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either Cell (biology), biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a netwo ...

. He is also known for his blog and as the developer of pqR: a new version of the R interpreter.

Bibliography

Books and chapters

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Selected papers

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References

Living people 1956 births University of Calgary alumni Computational statisticians University of Toronto alumni Academic staff of the University of Toronto Canadian statisticians Machine learning researchers {{Canada-scientist-stub