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 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 the co-inventor of the

support-vector machine 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 ...

method, and support-vector clustering algorithm.

Early life and education

Vladimir Vapnik was born to a

Jewish Jews ( he, יְהוּדִים, , ) or Jewish people are an ethnoreligious group and nation originating from the Israelites Israelite origins and kingdom: "The first act in the long drama of Jewish history is the age of the Israelites""The ...

family in the

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. He received his master's degree in mathematics from the Uzbek State University,

Samarkand fa, سمرقند , native_name_lang = , settlement_type = City , image_skyline = , image_caption = Clockwise from the top:Registan square, Shah-i-Zinda necropolis, Bibi-Khanym Mosque, view inside Shah-i-Zinda, ...

, Uzbek SSR in 1958 and

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statistics Statistics (from German language, German: ''wikt:Statistik#German, Statistik'', "description of a State (polity), state, a country") is the discipline that concerns the collection, organization, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of ...

at the Institute of Control Sciences,

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

in 1964. He worked at this institute from 1961 to 1990 and became Head of the Computer Science Research Department.

Academic career

At the end of 1990, Vladimir Vapnik moved to the

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and joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...

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in Holmdel, New Jersey. While at AT&T, Vapnik and his colleagues did work on the

, which he also worked on much earlier before moving to the USA. They demonstrated its performance on a number of problems of interest to the

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 ...

community, including handwriting recognition. The group later became the Image Processing Research Department of

AT&T Laboratories AT&T Laboratories, Inc. was the research & development division of AT&T Corporation. It was founded in 1925 as Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., following the merger of the research & development divisions of American Telephone & Telegraph an ...

when AT&T spun off

Lucent Technologies Lucent Technologies, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications equipment company headquartered in Murray Hill, New Jersey. It was established on September 30, 1996, through the divestiture of the former AT&T Technologies business u ...

in 1996. In 2000, Vapnik and neural networks expert, Hava Siegelmann developed Support-Vector Clustering, 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 joined

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Laboratories in

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, where he worked in the Machine Learning group. He also holds a Professor of Computer Science and Statistics position at

Royal Holloway, University of London Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public research university and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It has six schools, 21 academic departm ...

since 1995, as well as a position as Professor of Computer Science at

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

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since 2003. As of February 1, 2021, he has an

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of 86 and, overall, his publications have been cited 226597 times. His book on "The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory" alone has been cited 91650 times. On November 25, 2014, Vapnik joined

Facebook AI Research Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Mosk ...

, where he is working alongside his longtime collaborators Jason Weston, Léon Bottou, Ronan Collobert, and Yann LeCun. In 2016, he also joined

Vencore Labs Peraton Labs, previously branded as "Applied Communication Sciences," is a communications and information research and engineering company based in the United States. Previously the R&D arm of Telcordia Technologies, the company became a busines ...

Honors and awards

Vladimir Vapnik was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2006. He received the 2005 Gabor Award, the 2008 Paris Kanellakis Award, the 2010 Neural Networks Pioneer Award, the 2012 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award, the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute, the 2013 C&C Prize from the

C&C Foundation, the 2014 Kampé de Fériet Award, the 2017 IEEE John von Neumann Medal. In 2018, he received the Kolmogorov Medal from

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

and delivered the Kolmogorov Lecture. In 2019, Vladimir Vapnik received BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

Selected publications

* ''On the uniform convergence of relative frequencies of events to their probabilities'', co-author A. Y. Chervonenkis, 1971 * ''Necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniform convergence of means to their expectations'', co-author A. Y. Chervonenkis, 1981 * ''Estimation of Dependences Based on Empirical Data'', 1982 * ''The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory'', 1995 * ''Statistical Learning Theory'' (1998). Wiley-Interscience, . * ''Estimation of Dependences Based on Empirical Data'', Reprint 2006 (Springer), also contains a philosophical essay on ''Empirical Inference Science'', 2006

References

External links