Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (russian: Владимир Наумович Вапник; born 6 December 1936) 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 stati ...

of statistical learning, and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine method, and support-vector clustering algorithm.

Early life and education

Vladimir Vapnik was born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family in the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

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

Uzbek SSR Uzbekistan (, ) is the common English name for the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic (Uzbek SSR; uz, Ўзбекистон Совет Социалистик Республикаси, Oʻzbekiston Sovet Sotsialistik Respublikasi, in Russian: Уз ...

in 1958 and

Ph.D A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in statistics at the Institute of Control Sciences,

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...

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 and joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial Research and development, research and scientific developm ...

Holmdel, New Jersey Holmdel Township (usually shortened to Holmdel) is a township in Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States. The township is centrally located in the Raritan Valley region, being within the regional and cultural influence of the Raritan Baysh ...

. While at AT&T, Vapnik and his colleagues did work on the support-vector machine, 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 inquiry devoted to understanding and building methods that 'learn', that is, methods that leverage data to improve performance on some set of tasks. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Machine ...

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 handwritten input from sources such as paper documents, photographs, touch-screens and other de ...

. The group later became the Image Processing Research Department of

AT&T Laboratories AT&T Laboratories, Inc. was the research & development division of AT&T Corporation. It was founded in 1925 as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., following the merger of the research & development divisions of American Telephone & Telegraph an ...

when AT&T spun off

Lucent Technologies Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business u ...

in 1996. In 2000, Vapnik and neural networks expert,

Hava Siegelmann Hava Siegelmann is a professor of computer science. Her academic position is in the school of Computer Science and the Program of Neuroscience and Behavior at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; she is the director of the school's Biologica ...

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 Laboratories in

Princeton, New Jersey Princeton is a municipality with a borough form of government in Mercer County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton and Princeton Township, both of whi ...

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

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

New York City New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...

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 obvious success indicators such as ...

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 AI Research, where he is working alongside his longtime collaborators Jason Weston,

Léon Bottou Léon 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 image comp ...

, Ronan Collobert, and

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

. In 2016, he also joined Vencore Labs.

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, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of ...

in 2006. He received the 2005 Gabor Award, 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 Technical Field Award established by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Board of Directors in 2004. This award is presented for outstanding contributions to the advancement of the design, ...

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

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

, the 2013

C&C Prize The NEC C&C Prize ( ja, C&C賞) is an award given by the NEC Corporation "in recognition of outstanding contributions to research and development and/or pioneering work in the fields of semiconductors, computers, telecommunications and their integr ...

from the NEC 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-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

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