Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (; born 6 December 1936) is a statistician, researcher, and academic. He is one of the main developers of the

Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory (also known as VC theory) was developed during 1960–1990 by Vladimir Vapnik and Alexey Chervonenkis. The theory is a form of computational learning theory, which attempts to explain the learning process from a stat ...

statistical 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 ( ...

and the co-inventor of the

support-vector machine In machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks) are supervised learning, supervised Maximum-margin hyperplane, max-margin models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for Statistical classification ...

method and support-vector clustering algorithms.

Early life and education

Vladimir Vapnik was born to a

Jewish Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

family in the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

. He received his master's degree in mathematics from the Uzbek State University,

Samarkand Samarkand ( ; Uzbek language, Uzbek and Tajik language, Tajik: Самарқанд / Samarqand, ) is a city in southeastern Uzbekistan and among the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central As ...

Uzbek SSR The Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (, ), also known as Soviet Uzbekistan, the Uzbek SSR, UzSSR, or simply Uzbekistan and rarely Uzbekia, was a union republic of the Soviet Union. It was governed by the Uzbek branch of the Soviet Communist P ...

in 1958 and Ph.D 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 ...

at the Institute of Control Sciences,

Moscow Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...

in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 to 1990 and became Head of the Computer Science Research Department.

Academic career

At the end of 1990, Vladimir Vapnik moved to the

USA The United States of America (USA), also known as the United States (U.S.) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It is a federal republic of 50 states and a federal capital district, Washington, D.C. The 48 contiguous ...

and joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

Holmdel, New Jersey Holmdel is a township in Monmouth County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. Located near Raritan Bay in the Raritan Valley Region, the township is a regional commercial hub of Central Jersey, home to Bell Labs and PNC Bank Arts Center, and a ...

. While at AT&T, Vapnik and his colleagues did work on the

(SVM), which he also worked on much earlier before moving to the USA. They demonstrated its performance on a number of problems of interest to the

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 ( ...

community, including

handwriting recognition Handwriting recognition (HWR), also known as handwritten text recognition (HTR), is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwriting, handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens ...

. The group later became the Image Processing Research Department of

AT&T Laboratories AT&T Labs, Inc. (formerly AT&T Laboratories, Inc.) is the research & development division of AT&T, the telecommunications company. It employs some 1,800 people in various locations, including: Bedminster, New Jersey; Middletown, New Jersey; Ma ...

when AT&T spun off

Lucent Technologies Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American Multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the div ...

in 1996. In 2001, Asa Ben-Hur,

David Horn (Israeli physicist) David Horn (; born 10 September 1937) is a Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel Aviv University (TAU), Israel. He has served as Vice- Rector of TAU, Chairman of the School of Physics and Astronomy and as D ...

, Hava Siegelmann and Vapnik developed Support-Vector Clustering, which enabled the algorithm to categorize inputs without labels—becoming one of the most ubiquitous data clustering applications in use. Vapnik left AT&T in 2002 and joined

NEC is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Inte ...

Laboratories in

Princeton, New Jersey The Municipality of Princeton is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, Borough of Princeton and Pri ...

, where he worked in the Machine Learning group. He also holds a Professor of Computer Science and Statistics position at

Royal Holloway, University of London Royal Holloway, University of London (RH), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public university, public research university and a constituent college, member institution of the federal University of London. It ...

since 1995, as well as a position as Professor of Computer Science at

Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...

New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive w ...

since 2003. As of February 1, 2021, he has an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with success indicators such as winning t ...

of 86 and, overall, his publications have been cited 226597 times. His book on "The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory" alone has been cited 91650 times. On November 25, 2014, Vapnik joined Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (now

Meta AI Meta AI is a research division of Meta (formerly Facebook) that develops artificial intelligence and augmented reality technologies. History The foundation of laboratory was announced in 2013, under the name Facebook Artificial Intelligence ...

), where he is working alongside his longtime collaborators Jason Weston,

Léon Bottou Léon-Yves Bottou (; born 1965) is a researcher best known for his work in machine learning and data compression. His work presents stochastic gradient descent as a fundamental learning algorithm. He is also one of the main creators of the DjVu i ...

, Ronan Collobert, and

Yann LeCun Yann André Le Cun ( , ; usually spelled LeCun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Pr ...

. In 2016, he also joined

Peraton Labs Peraton Labs, previously branded as "Applied Communication Sciences," is a communications and information research and engineering company based in the United States. Previously the R&D arm of Telcordia Technologies, the company became a busines ...

Honors and awards

Vladimir Vapnik was inducted into the U.S.

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

in 2006. He received the 2005 Gabor Award from the

International Neural Network Society International is an adjective (also used as a noun) meaning "between nations". International may also refer to: Music Albums * ''International'' (Kevin Michael album), 2011 * ''International'' (New Order album), 2002 * ''International'' (The T ...

, the 2008

Paris Kanellakis Award The Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award is granted yearly by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to honor "specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing". It wa ...

, the 2010 Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the 2012

IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award The IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award is a Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers#Technical field awards, Technical Field Award established by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Board of Directors in 2004. This award is ...

, the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the

Franklin Institute The Franklin Institute is a science museum and a center of science education and research in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It is named after the American scientist and wikt:statesman, statesman Benjamin Franklin. It houses the Benjamin Franklin ...

, the 2013

C&C Prize The NEC C&C Prize () is an award given by the NEC Corporation is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered at the NEC Supertower in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. It provides IT and network solutions, ...

from the

C&C Foundation, the 2014 Kampé de Fériet Award, the 2017

IEEE John von Neumann Medal The IEEE John von Neumann Medal was established by the IEEE Board of Directors in 1990 and may be presented annually "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology." The achievements may be theoretical, technological, or ...

. In 2018, he received the Kolmogorov Medal from

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...

and delivered the Kolmogorov Lecture. In 2019, Vladimir Vapnik received

BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards () are an international award programme recognizing significant contributions in the areas of scientific research and cultural creation. The categories that make up the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards ...

Selected publications

* ''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). Wiley-Interscience, . * ''Estimation of Dependences Based on Empirical Data'', Reprint 2006 (Springer), also contains a philosophical essay on ''Empirical Inference Science'', 2006

References

External links