Vladimir Vapnik - Wikipedia
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Russian mathematician
Vladimir N. Vapnik
Born
1936-12-06
December 6, 1936
(age 89)
Tashkent, Uzbek SSR
Alma mater
Institute of Control Sciences, Russian Academy of Sciences
Uzbek State University
Known for
Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory
Vapnik–Chervonenkis dimension
Support-vector machine
Support-vector clustering algorithm
Statistical learning theory
Structural risk minimization
Awards
Kolmogorov Medal
(2018)
IEEE John von Neumann Medal
(2017)
Kampé de Fériet
Award (2014)
C&C Prize
(2013)
Benjamin Franklin Medal
(2012)
IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award
(2012)
IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award
(2010)
Paris Kanellakis Award
(2008)
Fellow of the U.S.
National Academy of Engineering
(2006)
Gabor Award, International Neural Network Society
(2005)
Alexander Humboldt Research Award
(2003)
Scientific career
Fields
Machine learning
Statistics
Institutions
Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research
Vencore Labs
NEC Laboratories America
Adaptive Systems Research
Department, AT&T Bell Laboratories
Royal Holloway, University of London
Columbia University
Doctoral advisor
Alexander Lerner
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 the
Vapnik–Chervonenkis theory
of
statistical learning
and the co-inventor of the
support-vector machine
method and support-vector clustering algorithms.
Early life and education
edit
Vladimir Vapnik was born to a
Jewish
family
in the
Soviet Union
. He received his master's degree in mathematics from the
Uzbek State University
Samarkand
Uzbek SSR
in 1958 and
Ph.D
in
statistics
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.
Academic career
edit
At the end of 1990, Vladimir Vapnik moved to the
USA
and joined the Adaptive Systems Research Department at
AT&T
Bell Labs
in
Holmdel, New Jersey
. While at AT&T, Vapnik and his colleagues did work on the
support-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 the
machine learning
community, including
handwriting recognition
. The group later became the Image Processing Research Department of
AT&T Laboratories
when AT&T spun off
Lucent Technologies
in 1996. In 2001,
Asa Ben-Hur
David Horn
Hava Siegelmann
and Vapnik 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
NEC
Laboratories in
Princeton, New Jersey
, 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
since 1995, as well as a position as Professor of Computer Science at
Columbia University
New York City
since 2003.
As of February 1, 2021, he has an
h-index
of 86 and, overall, his publications have been cited 226597 times.
His book on "The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory" alone has been cited around 113000 times.
On November 25, 2014, Vapnik joined Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research (now
Meta AI
),
where he is working alongside his longtime collaborators Jason Weston,
Léon Bottou
, Ronan Collobert, and
Yann LeCun
10
In 2016, he also joined
Peraton Labs
Honors and awards
edit
Vladimir Vapnik was inducted into the U.S.
National Academy of Engineering
in 2006. He received the 2005 Gabor Award from the
International Neural Network Society
11
the 2008
Paris Kanellakis Award
, the 2010 Neural Networks Pioneer Award,
12
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
NEC
C&C Foundation,
13
the 2014 Kampé de Fériet Award, the 2017
IEEE John von Neumann Medal
14
In 2018, he received the Kolmogorov Medal
15
from
University of London
and delivered the Kolmogorov Lecture. In 2019, Vladimir Vapnik received
BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
16
Selected publications
edit
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,
ISBN
0-471-03003-1
Estimation of Dependences Based on Empirical Data
, Reprint 2006 (Springer), also contains a philosophical essay on
Empirical Inference Science
, 2006
See also
edit
Alexey Chervonenkis
References
edit
Vapnik, Vladimir N. (2000).
The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory | Vladimir Vapnik | Springer
doi
10.1007/978-1-4757-3264-1
ISBN
978-1-4419-3160-3
S2CID
7138354
Cortes, Corinna; Vapnik, Vladimir (1995-09-01). "Support-vector networks".
Machine Learning
20
(3):
273–
297.
CiteSeerX
10.1.1.15.9362
doi
10.1007/BF00994018
ISSN
0885-6125
S2CID
206787478
Estimation of Dependences Based on Empirical Data
, (Springer Science & Business Media, 28 Sep 2006), By V. Vapnik, page 424
"Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science"
. Franklin Institute. 2012
. Retrieved
April 6,
2013
Support Vector Clustering. Journal of Machine Learning Research 2, 125-137 (2001)
Scholkopf, Bernhard (2013).
"Preface"
Empirical Inference: Festschrift in Honor of Vladimir N. Vapnik
. Springer.
ISBN
978-3-642-41136-6
"Google Scholar Record of Vapnik"
"‪Cites records of "The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory‬"
scholar.google.com
. Retrieved
2026-03-25
"Facebook AI Research"
FAIR
. Retrieved
2016-09-20
; "see also"
"Facebook Research, ("People" entry for "Vladimir Vapnik")"
. Retrieved
2017-09-06
"Facebook's AI team hires Vladimir Vapnik, father of the popular support vector machine algorithm"
. VentureBeat. 2014. Archived from
the original
on 2014-11-27
. Retrieved
November 28,
2014
"INNS awards recipients"
. International Neural Network Society. 2005
. Retrieved
November 28,
2014
"IEEE Computational Intelligence Society"
. Archived from
the original
on 2011-10-11
. Retrieved
2011-12-23
"NEC C&C Foundation Awards 2013 C&C Prize"
. NEC. 2013
. Retrieved
December 3,
2013
"IEEE JOHN VON NEUMANN MEDAL RECIPIENTS"
(PDF)
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE)
. Archived from
the original
(PDF)
on June 19, 2010.
"Kolmogorov Lecture and Medal"
"Vladimir Vapnik, 12th Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Information and Communication Technologies"
Premios Fronteras
. Retrieved
2026-03-25
External links
edit
Photograph of Professor Vapnik
Vapnik's brief biography
from the Computer Learning Research Centre, Royal Holloway
Interview by Lex Fridman
Winners of the
Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award
Adleman
Diffie
Hellman
Merkle
Rivest
Shamir
(1996)
Lempel
Ziv
(1997)
Bryant
Clarke
Emerson
McMillan
(1998)
Sleator
Tarjan
(1999)
Karmarkar
(2000)
Myers
(2001)
Franaszek
(2002)
Miller
Rabin
Solovay
Strassen
(2003)
Freund
Schapire
(2004)
Holzmann
Kurshan
Vardi
Wolper
(2005)
Brayton
(2006)
Buchberger
(2007)
Cortes
Vapnik
(2008)
Bellare
Rogaway
(2009)
Mehlhorn
(2010)
Samet
(2011)
Broder
Charikar
Indyk
(2012)
Blumofe
Leiserson
(2013)
Demmel
(2014)
Luby
(2015)
Fiat
Naor
(2016)
Shenker
(2017)
Pevzner
(2018)
Alon
Gibbons
Matias
Szegedy
(2019)
Azar
Broder
Karlin
Mitzenmacher
Upfal
(2020)
Blum
Dinur
Dwork
McSherry
Nissim
Smith
(2021)
Burrows
Ferragina
Manzini
(2022)
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Academics
Mathematics Genealogy Project
Scopus
zbMATH
Google Scholar
DBLP
MathSciNet
People
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DDB
Other
IdRef
Open Library
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1936 births
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