Bernhard Schölkopf (born 20 February 1968) is a German computer scientist 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,
Germany
Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...
, where he heads the Department of Empirical Inference. He is also an affiliated professor at
ETH Zürich, honorary professor at the
University of Tübingen and
Technische Universität Berlin, and chairman of the
European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).
Research
Kernel methods
Schölkopf developed
SVM methods achieving world record performance on the
MNIST pattern recognition benchmark at the time. With the introduction of
kernel PCA, Schölkopf and coauthors argued that SVMs are a special case of a much larger class of methods, and all algorithms that can be expressed in terms of
dot product
In mathematics, the dot product or scalar productThe term ''scalar product'' means literally "product with a Scalar (mathematics), scalar as a result". It is also used for other symmetric bilinear forms, for example in a pseudo-Euclidean space. N ...
s can be generalized to a nonlinear setting by means of what is known as reproducing kernels.
Another significant observation was that the data on which the kernel is defined need not be vectorial, as long as the kernel
Gram matrix is positive definite.
Both insights together led to the foundation of the field of
kernel methods, encompassing SVMs and many other algorithms. Kernel methods are now textbook knowledge and one of the major machine learning paradigms in research and applications.
Developing kernel PCA, Schölkopf extended it to extract invariant features and to design invariant kernels
and showed how to view other major dimensionality reduction methods such as
LLE and Isomap as special cases. In further work with Alex Smola and others, he extended the SVM method to regression and classification with pre-specified sparsity and quantile/support estimation. He proved a
representer theorem
For computer science, in statistical learning theory, a representer theorem is any of several related results stating that a minimizer f^ of a regularized Empirical risk minimization, empirical risk functional defined over a reproducing kernel Hi ...
implying that SVMs, kernel PCA, and most other kernel algorithms, regularized by a norm in a
reproducing kernel Hilbert space
In functional analysis, a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) is a Hilbert space of functions in which point evaluation is a continuous linear functional. Specifically, a Hilbert space H of functions from a set X (to \mathbb or \mathbb) is ...
, have solutions taking the form of kernel expansions on the training data, thus reducing an infinite dimensional optimization problem to a finite dimensional one. He co-developed
kernel embeddings of distributions methods to represent probability distributions in Hilbert Spaces, with links to
Fraunhofer diffraction as well as applications to independence testing.
Causality
Starting in 2005, Schölkopf turned his attention to
causal inference. Causal mechanisms in the world give rise to statistical dependencies as epiphenomena, but only the latter are exploited by popular machine learning algorithms. Knowledge about causal structures and mechanisms is useful by letting us predict not only future data coming from the same source, but also the effect of interventions in a system, and by facilitating transfer of detected regularities to new situations.
[B. Schölkopf, D. Janzing, J. Peters, E. Sgouritsa, K. Zhang, and J. Mooij. On causal and anticausal learning. In J. Langford and J. Pineau, editors, Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), pages 1255–1262, New York, NY, USA, 2012. Omnipress]
Schölkopf and co-workers addressed (and in certain settings solved) the problem of causal discovery for the two-variable setting and connected causality to
Kolmogorov complexity.
Around 2010, Schölkopf began to explore how to use causality for machine learning, exploiting assumptions of independence of mechanisms and invariance. His early work on
causal learning was exposed to a wider machine learning audience during his Posner lecture at
NeurIPS 2011, as well as in a keynote talk at
ICML 2017.
He assayed how to exploit underlying causal structures in order to make machine learning methods more robust with respect to distribution shifts
and systematic errors, the latter leading to the discovery of a number of new exoplanets including
K2-18b, which was subsequently found to contain water vapour in its atmosphere, a first for an exoplanet in the
habitable zone.
Education and employment
Schölkopf studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy in Tübingen and London. He was supported by the
Studienstiftung and won the Lionel Cooper Memorial Prize for the best M.Sc. in Mathematics at the
University of London
The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in Post-nominal letters, post-nominals) is a collegiate university, federal Public university, public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The ...
. He completed a
Diplom in Physics, and then moved to
Bell Labs
Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...
in New Jersey, where he worked with
Vladimir Vapnik
Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik (; born 6 December 1936) is a statistician, researcher, and academic. He is one of the main developers of the Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory of statistical learning and the co-inventor of the support-vector machine method ...
, who became co-adviser of his PhD thesis at
TU Berlin
Tu or TU may refer to:
Language
* Tu language
* Tu (cuneiform), a cuneiform sign
* ''tu'' or ''tú'' the 2nd-person singular subject pronoun in many languages; see personal pronoun
* T–V distinction (from the Latin pronouns ''tu'' and ''vos'') ...
(with Stefan Jähnichen). His thesis, defended in 1997, won the annual award of the
German Informatics Association. In 2001, following positions in Berlin, Cambridge and New York, he founded the Department for Empirical Inference at the
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
The Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics is located in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is one of 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft). It was founded in 1968.
The institute is studying signal a ...
, which grew into a leading center for research in machine learning. In 2011, he became founding director at the
Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems.
With Alex Smola, Schölkopf co-founded the series of Machine Learning Summer Schools. He also co-founded a Cambridge-Tübingen PhD Programme and the Max Planck-ETH Center for Learning Systems. In 2016, he co-founded the Cyber Valley research consortium. He participated in the IEEE Global Initiative on "Ethically Aligned Design".
Schölkopf is co-editor-in-Chief 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 ...
, a journal he helped found, being part of a mass resignation of the editorial board of
Machine Learning (journal)
''Machine Learning'' is a peer-reviewed scientific journal, published since 1986.
In 2001, forty editors and members of the editorial board of ''Machine Learning'' resigned in order to support the ''Journal of Machine Learning Research'' (JMLR), ...
. He is among the world’s most cited computer scientists. Alumni of his lab include
Ulrike von Luxburg, Carl Rasmussen, Matthias Hein, Arthur Gretton, Gunnar Rätsch, Matthias Bethge, Stefanie Jegelka, Jason Weston, Olivier Bousquet, Olivier Chapelle, Joaquin Quinonero-Candela, and Sebastian Nowozin.
As of late 2023, Schölkopf is also a scientific advisor to French research group Kyutai which is being funded by
Xavier Niel
Xavier Niel (; born 25 August 1967) is a French billionaire businessman. He is involved in the telecommunications and technology industry and is the founder and majority shareholder of the French Internet service provider and mobile operator Il ...
,
Rodolphe Saadé
Rodolphe Saadé (; ; born 3 March 1970) is a Franco-Lebanese businessman. He is the chairman of the CMA CGM, CMA CGM Group, a world leader in logistics transport, and the son of its founder, Jacques Saadé. As of April 2024, his net worth was e ...
,
Eric Schmidt
Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American businessman and former computer engineer who was the chief executive officer of Google from 2001 to 2011 and the company's chairman, executive chairman from 2011 to 2015. He also was the ...
, and others.
Awards
Schölkopf’s awards include the
Royal Society Milner Award
The Royal Society Milner Award, formally the Royal Society Milner Award and Lecture, is awarded annually by the Royal Society, a London-based learned society, for "outstanding achievement in computer science by a European researcher". The award ...
and, shared with Isabelle Guyon and Vladimir Vapnik, the
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
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 ...
in the Information and Communication Technologies category. He was the first scientist working in Europe to receive this award.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Scholkopf, Bernhard
German computer scientists
Machine learning researchers
German artificial intelligence researchers
Max Planck Society people
1968 births
Living people
University of Tübingen alumni
Technische Universität Berlin alumni
Members of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina
2017 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize winners
Alumni of the University of London
Academic staff of ETH Zurich
Scientists at Bell Labs
Studienstiftung alumni
Max Planck Institute directors