Facebook AI Research just reinforced its ensemble by hiring Vladimir Vapnik, long considered to be the father of statistical learning theory. The latest high-profile hire to Facebook’s burgeoning AI department was announced, naturally, via the medium of a Facebook post.
Vapnik is responsible for the Vapnik-Chervonenkis Dimension – the concept that measures the capacity of a learning machine – and the co-inventor of the first Support Vector Machine (SVM)  algorithm.
Migrating over from University of London for the new position at Facebook, Mr. Vapnik will be joining the team headed by convolutional neural networks innovatior Yann LeCun. Vapnik will also be working with former colleagues from AT&T research, Jason Weston & Ronan Collobert.
Divulging some of the details of Vapnik’s work, the Facebook post states: “He is working on new book, and will be collaborating with FAIR research scientists to develop some of his new ideas on conditional density estimation, learning with privileged information, and other topics.”
Deep learning is certainly a hot field, with industry titans Google, Microsoft and Baidu also exploring this field. With the wealth of data available to all of these companies- and high-profile hires of each of their teams- the levels of hype and excitement about this field of research continues to escalate.
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(Image credit: Lecun.org)
