John Langford (born January 2, 1975) is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus ( ...

working in

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 ...

and learning theory, a field that he says "is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool". He is well known for work on the

Isomap Isomap is a nonlinear dimensionality reduction method. It is one of several widely used low-dimensional embedding methods. Isomap is used for computing a quasi-isometric, low-dimensional embedding of a set of high-dimensional data points. The algo ...

embedding algorithm,

CAPTCHA A CAPTCHA ( , a contrived acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart") is a type of challenge–response test used in computing to determine whether the user is human. The term was coined in 2003 b ...

challenges, Cover Trees for nearest neighbor search, Contextual Bandits (which he coined) for

reinforcement learning Reinforcement learning (RL) is an area of machine learning concerned with how intelligent agents ought to take actions in an environment in order to maximize the notion of cumulative reward. Reinforcement learning is one of three basic machine ...

applications, and learning reductions. John is the author of the

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

br>hunch.net
and the principal developer of

Vowpal Wabbit Vowpal Wabbit (VW) is an open-source fast online interactive machine learning system library and program developed originally at Yahoo! Research, and currently at Microsoft Research. It was started and is led by John Langford. Vowpal Wabbit's int ...

. He works at

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

New York, of which he was one of the founding members, and was previously affiliated with Yahoo! Research,

Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago (TTIC or TTI-Chicago) is a private graduate college and research institute focused on computer science and located in Chicago, Illinois within the University of Chicago campus. It is supported by the ear ...

, and IBM's Watson Research Center. He studied

Physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which rel ...

and

Computer Science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to practical disciplines (includin ...

at the

California Institute of Technology The California Institute of Technology (branded as Caltech or CIT)The university itself only spells its short form as "Caltech"; the institution considers other spellings such a"Cal Tech" and "CalTech" incorrect. The institute is also occasional ...

, earning a double bachelor's degree in 1997, and he received his

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 a ...

in Computer Science from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

in the year of 2002. John was the program co-chair for the 2012 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), general chair for the 2016 ICML, and is the President of ICML from 2019–2021.

References

California Institute of Technology alumni Carnegie Mellon University alumni Living people American computer scientists Machine learning researchers Microsoft employees 1975 births {{Compu-bio-stub