Robert Elias Schapire is an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

renowned for his contributions to

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 ( ...

theory and its applications. He was formerly a

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

professor at

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 ...

before joining

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 ...

. His research focuses on theoretical and

applied machine learning Machine learning (ML) is a field of study in artificial intelligence concerned with the development and study of statistical algorithms that can learn from data and generalise to unseen data, and thus perform tasks without explicit instr ...

, with particular emphasis on

ensemble learning In statistics and machine learning, ensemble methods use multiple learning algorithms to obtain better predictive performance than could be obtained from any of the constituent learning algorithms alone. Unlike a statistical ensemble in statist ...

Career

Schapire's most significant contribution to computer science is the development of boosting, a fundamental

algorithm that has revolutionized machine learning. His doctoral dissertation, ''The design and analysis of efficient learning algorithms,'' earned him the

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is awarded annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to the authors of the best doctoral dissertations in computer science and computer engineering. The award is accompanied by a prize of US$20,000 a ...

in 1991. In 1996, collaborating with

Yoav Freund __NOTOC__ Yoav Freund (; born 1961) is an Israeli professor of computer science at the University of California San Diego who mainly works on machine learning, probability theory and related fields and applications. He is an alumnus of the Hebr ...

, he invented the

AdaBoost AdaBoost (short for Adaptive Boosting) is a statistical classification meta-algorithm formulated by Yoav Freund and Robert Schapire in 1995, who won the 2003 Gödel Prize for their work. It can be used in conjunction with many types of learnin ...

algorithm, a breakthrough that led to their joint receipt of the

Gödel Prize The Gödel Prize is an annual prize for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science, given jointly by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the Association for Computing Machinery Special Inter ...

in 2003. Schapire was elected an

AAAI Fellow Fellowship of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (abbreviated as AAAI Fellow or FAAAI) is an award granted to individuals that the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), judged to have made ...

in 2009. In 2014, he was elected a member of the

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 ...

for his contributions to machine learning through the invention and development of boosting algorithms. In 2016, he was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

Selected works

Books

References

External links

Robert Schapire's home page
Gödel Prize laureates Princeton University faculty Living people Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Year of birth missing (living people) {{US-compu-bio-stub Brown University alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni