John D. Lafferty is an American scientist, Professor at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

and leading researcher in

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 ( ...

. He is best known for proposing the

Conditional Random Field Conditional random fields (CRFs) are a class of statistical modeling methods often applied in pattern recognition and machine learning and used for structured prediction. Whereas a classifier predicts a label for a single sample without consi ...

s with

Andrew McCallum Andrew McCallum is a professor in the computer science department at University of Massachusetts Amherst. His primary specialties are in machine learning, natural language processing, information extraction, information integration, and social ...

and Fernando C.N. Pereira.

Biography

In 2017, Lafferty was appointed the John C. Malone Professor of Statistics and Data Science at

. He previously taught at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

as Louis Block Professor of Statistics and Computer Science, and has held positions at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

and the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego in communications material, formerly and colloquially UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California, United States. Es ...

. His research interests lie in statistical machine learning,

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

, and

natural language processing Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and especially artificial intelligence. It is primarily concerned with providing computers with the ability to process data encoded in natural language and is thus closely related ...

, with a focus on computational and statistical aspects of nonparametric methods, high-dimensional data and

graphical models A graphical model or probabilistic graphical model (PGM) or structured probabilistic model is a probabilistic model for which a graph expresses the conditional dependence structure between random variables. Graphical models are commonly used i ...

. Prior to University of Chicago in 2011, he was faculty at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...

since 1994, where he helped to found the world's first machine-learning department. Before CMU, he was a research staff member at IBM

Thomas J. Watson Research Center The Thomas J. Watson Research Center is the headquarters for IBM Research. Its main laboratory is in Yorktown Heights, New York, 38 miles (61 km) north of New York City. It also operates facilities in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Albany, ...

, where he worked on natural speech and text processing in the group led by

Frederick Jelinek Frederick Jelinek (18 November 1932 – 14 September 2010) was a Czech-American researcher in information theory, automatic speech recognition, and natural language processing. He is well known for his oft-quoted statement, "Every time I fire ...

. Lafferty received a Ph.D. in mathematics from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, where he was a member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, under

Edward Nelson Edward Nelson (May 4, 1932 – September 10, 2014) was an American mathematician. He was professor in the Mathematics Department at Princeton University. He was known for his work on mathematical physics and mathematical logic. In mathematical l ...

in 1986. He was an assistant professor in the Mathematics Department at

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

before joining IBM. He was elected Fellow of

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

in 2007 "for contributions to statistical pattern recognition and statistical language processing".

Academic career

Lafferty has held many positions, including: 1) program co-chair and general co-chair of the Neural Information Processing Systems ( NIPS) Foundation conferences; 2) co-director of CMU's new Ph.D. Machine Learning Ph.D. Program; 3) associate editor of the

Journal of Machine Learning Research The ''Journal of Machine Learning Research'' is a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal covering machine learning. It was established in 2000 and the first editor-in-chief was Leslie Kaelbling. The current editors-in-chief are Francis Bac ...

and the Electronic Journal of Statistics; and 4) member of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics (CATS) of the National Research Council. He has also received numerous awards, including two Test-of-Time awards at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2011 & 2012, classic paper prize of ICML 2013, and Test-of-Time awards at the Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) 2014.

Selected works

* 1990. ''A statistical approach to machine translation''. : The idea of

statistical machine translation Statistical machine translation (SMT) is a machine translation approach where translations are generated on the basis of statistical models whose parameters are derived from the analysis of bilingual text corpora. The statistical approach contra ...

was born in the labs of IBM Research. * 2001. ''Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data''. : Test-of-Time Award of ICML 2011. * 2002. ''Diffusion Kernels on Graphs and Other Discrete Input Spaces''. : Test-of-Time Award of ICML 2012. * 2003. ''Semi-Supervised Learning Using Gaussian Fields and Harmonic Functions''. : Classic paper prizes of ICML 2013. * 2003. ''Beyond independent relevance: methods and evaluation metrics for subtopic retrieval''. : Test of Time Award of SIGIR 2014. * 2006. ''Dynamic topic models''. ICML'06.

References

External links

John D Lafferty UChicago
(at University of Chicago)
John Lafferty: Teaching Computers to Learn
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lafferty, John D. Living people American artificial intelligence researchers Machine learning researchers University of Chicago faculty Carnegie Mellon University faculty Year of birth missing (living people) Natural language processing researchers American computer scientists Yale University faculty Middlebury College alumni Princeton University alumni

Biography

Academic career

Selected works

See also

References

External links