Isabelle Guyon (; born August 15, 1961) is a French-born researcher 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 ...
known for her work on
support-vector machines,
artificial neural networks
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...
and
bioinformatics
Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...
.
She is a Chair Professor at the
University of Paris-Saclay
Paris-Saclay University (french: Université Paris-Saclay) is a public research university based in Paris, France. It is one of the 13 prestigious universities that emerged from the division of the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne. ...
.
She is considered to be a pioneer in the field, with her contribution to the
support-vector machines with
Vladimir Vapnik
Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (russian: Владимир Наумович Вапник; born 6 December 1936) is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning, and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine ...
and
Bernhard Boser
Bernhard is both a given name and a surname. Notable people with the name include:
Given name
*Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar (1604–1639), Duke of Saxe-Weimar
*Bernhard, Prince of Saxe-Meiningen (1901–1984), head of the House of Saxe-Meiningen 1946 ...
.
Biography
After graduating from the French engineering school
ESPCI Paris
ESPCI Paris (officially the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la Ville de Paris; ''The City of Paris Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution'') is a prestigious grande école founded in 1882 by ...
in 1985, she joined the group of
Gerard Dreyfus at the
Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie
Pierre and Marie Curie University (french: link=no, Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie, UPMC), also known as Paris 6, was a public research university in Paris, France, from 1971 to 2017. The university was located on the Jussieu Campus in the La ...
to do a PhD on neural networks architectures and training.
Guyon defended her thesis in 1988 and was hired the year after at
AT&T Bell Laboratories
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 scientific development company owned by mult ...
, first as a post-doc, then as a group leader.
She worked at Bell Labs for six years, where she explored several research areas, from
neural networks
A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
to
pattern recognition
Pattern recognition is the automated recognition of patterns and regularities in data. It has applications in statistical data analysis, signal processing, image analysis, information retrieval, bioinformatics, data compression, computer graphi ...
and
computational learning theory
In computer science, computational learning theory (or just learning theory) is a subfield of artificial intelligence devoted to studying the design and analysis of machine learning algorithms.
Overview
Theoretical results in machine learning m ...
, with application to
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 dev ...
. She collaborated with
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 Professor ...
,
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 co ...
,
Vladimir Vapnik
Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (russian: Владимир Наумович Вапник; born 6 December 1936) is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning, and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine ...
,
Corinna Cortes
Corinna Cortes is a Danish computer scientist known for her contributions to machine learning. She is currently the Head of Google Research, New York City, New York. Cortes is a recipient of the Paris Kanellakis Award, Paris Kanellakis Theory and ...
,
Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist, most noted for his work on artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Department of Computer Science and Operations Research at the Université de ...
,
Patrice Simard Patrice is a given name meaning ''noble'' or ''patrician'', related to the names Patrick and Patricia.
In English, Patrice is often a feminine first name. In French, it is used as a masculine first name.
Popularity
In the United States, the popul ...
, and met her future husband, Bernhard Boser
In 1996, Guyon left Bell Labs and raised her children at
Berkeley
Berkeley most often refers to:
*Berkeley, California, a city in the United States
**University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California
* George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher
Berkeley may also refer ...
, California.
In Berkeley, she created her own machine learning consulting company, Clopinet. She became interested in medical applications, and used her previous work to classify the genes responsible for different types of cancers.
Since 2003, Guyon has organized many challenges in data science, in order to stimulate research in this field.
She founded ChaLearn in 2011, a non-profit organization aimed at creating machine learning challenges open to everyone.
She was Program Chair of
NeurIPS
The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meet ...
2016 et became General Chair of
NeurIPS
The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (abbreviated as NeurIPS and formerly NIPS) is a machine learning and computational neuroscience conference held every December. The conference is currently a double-track meet ...
in 2017. She is also Action Editor for 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 Ba ...
and Series Editor for ''Series: Challenges in Machine Learning.'' She is a member of the
European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems
ELLIS - the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems - is a pan-European AI network of excellence which focuses on fundamental science, technical innovation and societal impact. Founded in 2018, ELLIS builds upon machine learnin ...
.
In 2016, Guyon came back to France to take the Chair Professorship in Big data between the
University of Paris-Saclay
Paris-Saclay University (french: Université Paris-Saclay) is a public research university based in Paris, France. It is one of the 13 prestigious universities that emerged from the division of the University of Paris, also known as the Sorbonne. ...
and
INRIA
The National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (Inria) () is a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics.
It was created under the name ''Institut de recherche en informatiq ...
.
She works in the group TAU (TAckling the Underspecified) of the
Laboratoire de recherche en informatique.
With
Bernhard Schölkopf
Bernhard Schölkopf is a German computer scientist (born 20 February 1968) known for his work in machine learning, especially on kernel methods and causality. He is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Ge ...
and Vladimir Vapnik, she received in 2020 the
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards
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 ...
for her work in machine learning.
Scientific work
Guyon has worked in many subfields of machine learning, including
neural networks
A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
,
support-vector machines,
feature selection
In machine learning and statistics, feature selection, also known as variable selection, attribute selection or variable subset selection, is the process of selecting a subset of relevant features (variables, predictors) for use in model construc ...
and
applications of machine learning to biology.
Support-vector machines
Among her most notable contributions, Guyon co-invented
support-vector machines (SVM) in 1992, with Bernhard Boser and Vladimir Vapnik. SVM is a supervised machine learning algorithm, comparable to
neural networks
A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
or
decision trees
A decision tree is a decision support tool that uses a tree-like model of decisions and their possible consequences, including chance event outcomes, resource costs, and utility. It is one way to display an algorithm that only contains condit ...
, which has quickly become a classical technique in machine learning. SVMs have especially contributed to the popularization of
kernel methods
In machine learning, kernel machines are a class of algorithms for pattern analysis, whose best known member is the support-vector machine (SVM). The general task of pattern analysis is to find and study general types of relations (for example ...
.
Neural networks
During her years at Bell Labs, Guyon took part of numerous projects involving
neural networks
A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...
. In particular, she wrote some of the first papers on the use of neural network for
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 dev ...
using the
MNIST database
The MNIST database (''Modified National Institute of Standards and Technology database'') is a large database of handwritten digits that is commonly used for training various image processing systems. The database is also widely used for training a ...
. She is also a co-inventor of the
siamese neural networks, a neural network architecture used to learn similarities, with applications to signature, face or object recognition.
Machine learning for biology
Guyon is the author of many publications at the intersection of biology (cancer research and genomics) and artificial intelligence. She has notably introduced the use of support-vector machines to detect cancer using genes.
Machine learning challenges
Through her non-profit organization Chalearn, Guyon has organized and directed challenges open to everyone in order to solve open problems in machine learning,
including
computer vision
Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images or videos. From the perspective of engineering, it seeks to understand and automate tasks that the hum ...
,
neurosciences
Neuroscience is the science, scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a Multidisciplinary approach, multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, an ...
,
particle physics
Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standard Model as fermions (matter particles) an ...
,
feature selection
In machine learning and statistics, feature selection, also known as variable selection, attribute selection or variable subset selection, is the process of selecting a subset of relevant features (variables, predictors) for use in model construc ...
and
automated machine learning
Automated machine learning (AutoML) is the process of automating the tasks of applying machine learning to real-world problems. AutoML potentially includes every stage from beginning with a raw dataset to building a machine learning model ready ...
. Most of the challenges organized by ChaLearn have resulted in publications. Among the most cited ones are:
* Guyon et al., ''Result analysis of the NIPS 2003 feature selection challenge'', Advances in neural information processing systems, 2005
link* Escalera et al., ''ChaLearn Looking at People Challenge 2014: Dataset and Results'', Computer Vision - ECCV 2014 Workshops, Springer International Publishing, 2014
link* Guyon et al., A brief Review of the ChaLearn AutoML Challenge, JMLR: Workshop and Conference Proceedings 64:21-30, 2016
* Adam-Bourdario et al., ''The Higgs boson machine learning challenge'', JMLR: Workshop and Conference Proceedings 42:19-55, 2015
link
Private life
She is married to Bernhard Boser, a professor at
UC 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. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...
. She has twins and one daughter, all three of whom have completed a science degree. Guyon has three citizenships: French by birth, Swiss by marriage and American by naturalization.
Awards and honors
* Recipient of the
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards
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 ...
(2020)
*
American Medical Informatics Association
The American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), is an American non-profit organization dedicated to the development and application of biomedical and health informatics in the support of patient care, teaching, research, and health care ad ...
Fellow (2011)
Publications
* Bernhard Boser, Isabelle Guyon and
Vladmir Vapnik, ''A training algorithm for optimal margin classifiers'', Proceedings of the fifth annual workshop on Computational learning theory, 1992, do
10.1145/130385.130401* Jane Bromley, Isabelle Guyon,
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 Professor ...
, Eduard Säckinger and Roopak Shah,
Signature verification using a" siamese" time delay neural network', Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 1994.
* Isabelle Guyon and André Elisseeff,
An introduction to variable and feature selection', Journal of Machine Learning Research, 2003.
* Isabelle Guyon, Jason Weston, Stephen Barnhill and Vladimir Vapnik, ''Gene selection for cancer classification using support vector machines'', Machine Learning, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002, doi
10.1023/A:1012487302797
See also
*
Support Vector Machines
In machine learning, support vector machines (SVMs, also support vector networks) are supervised learning models with associated learning algorithms that analyze data for classification and regression analysis. Developed at AT&T Bell Laboratorie ...
*
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 ...
*
Deep learning
Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised.
De ...
*
Artificial neural networks
Artificial neural networks (ANNs), usually simply called neural networks (NNs) or neural nets, are computing systems inspired by the biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
An ANN is based on a collection of connected unit ...
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guyon, Isabelle
Living people
French emigrants to the United States
Machine learning researchers
French computer scientists
American computer scientists
Scientists at Bell Labs
Paris-Saclay University faculty
Artificial intelligence researchers
Pierre and Marie Curie University alumni
ESPCI Paris alumni
1961 births