The 2008
ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award was awarded to
Corinna Cortes and
Vladimir Vapnik "
for the development of Support Vector Machines, a highly effective algorithm for classification and related machine learning problems".
It's not the first time this award is given to Machine Learning people. In 2004 it was awarded to
Yoav Freund and
Robert Schapire "
for the development of the theory and practice of boosting and its applications to machine learning."
I found a bit weird that they left
Bernhard Boser and
Isabelle Guyon out of the prize, because they were Vapnik's co-authors in the 1992 paper "
A training algorithm for optimal margin classifiers", which I guess is
considered to be the first paper on Support Vector Machines...
Anyway, congratulation to the winners. These are indeed elegant algorithms with sound theoretical foundations and numerous sucessful applications to vision, speech, natural language and robotics, to name just a few.
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Remarks:
Thanks to my cousin
Rui for the link to this news.
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Related post:
Vapnik's picture explained.