Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (Russian:Владимир Наумович Вапник; born 6 December 1936) is a statistician, researcher, and academic. He is one of the main developers of theVapnik–Chervonenkis theory ofstatistical learning[1] and the co-inventor of thesupport-vector machine method and support-vector clustering algorithms.[2]
Vladimir Vapnik was born to aJewish family[3] in theSoviet Union. He received his master's degree in mathematics from theUzbek State University,Samarkand,Uzbek SSR in 1958 andPh.D instatistics at the Institute of Control Sciences,Moscow in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 to 1990 and became Head of the Computer Science Research Department.[4]
At the end of 1990, Vladimir Vapnik moved to theUSA and joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department atAT&TBell Labs inHolmdel, New Jersey. While at AT&T, Vapnik and his colleagues did work on thesupport-vector machine (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 themachine learning community, includinghandwriting recognition. The group later became the Image Processing Research Department ofAT&T Laboratories when AT&T spun offLucent Technologies in 1996. In 2001,Asa Ben-Hur,David Horn (Israeli physicist),Hava Siegelmann and Vapnik developed Support-Vector Clustering,[5] 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 joinedNEC Laboratories inPrinceton, New Jersey, where he worked in the Machine Learning group. He also holds a Professor of Computer Science and Statistics position atRoyal Holloway, University of London since 1995, as well as a position as Professor of Computer Science atColumbia University,New York City since 2003.[6] As of February 1, 2021, he has anh-index of 86 and, overall, his publications have been cited 226597 times.[7] His book on "The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory" alone has been cited 91650 times.[citation needed]
On November 25, 2014, Vapnik joined Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (nowMeta AI),[8] where he is working alongside his longtime collaborators Jason Weston,Léon Bottou, Ronan Collobert, andYann LeCun.[9]In 2016, he also joinedPeraton Labs.
Vladimir Vapnik was inducted into the U.S.National Academy of Engineering in 2006. He received the 2005 Gabor Award from theInternational Neural Network Society,[10] the 2008Paris Kanellakis Award, the 2010 Neural Networks Pioneer Award,[11] the 2012IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, the 2012Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from theFranklin Institute,[4] the 2013C&C Prize from theNEC C&C Foundation,[12] the 2014 Kampé de Fériet Award, the 2017IEEE John von Neumann Medal.[13] In 2018, he received the Kolmogorov Medal[14] fromUniversity of London and delivered the Kolmogorov Lecture. In 2019, Vladimir Vapnik receivedBBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.[citation needed]
