Alexander J. Smola

Professor, Australian National University
Senior Principal Researcher, NICTA

7 London Circuit, Tower 2
Canberra ACT 2600
Australia

Fax:	(+61) 2 6282-7860
Mobile:	(+61) 410 457 686
email:

News

NIPS Workshop chair with Maneesh Sahani.
ICML Tutorial on painless representations of distributions with Kenji Fukumizu and Arthur Gretton.
I am moving to Yahoo! Research in September. More details coming soon.

Interests

My research interest are nonparametric methods for estimation, in particular kernel methods and exponential families. This includes support vector Machines, gaussian processes, and conditional random fields. Kernels are very useful also for the representation of distributions, that is two-sample tests, independence tests and many applications to unsupervised learning. In practice this work requires similarity measures on discrete objects (graphs, strings, automata), large scale optimization and numerical analysis (interior point methods, matrix factorization), and learning theory (uniform convergence bounds, design of priors, etc.). I am working on problems in bioinformatics, pattern recognition, document analysis, computer vision and optimization for parallell processing.

Books

G. Bakir, T. Hofmann, B. Schölkopf, A.J. Smola, B. Taskar, and S.V.N. Vishwanathan, editors. Predicting Structured Data. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2006.
S. Mendelson and A. J. Smola, editors. Machine Learning, Proceedings of the Summer School 2002, Australian National University, volume 2600 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer, 2003.
B. Schölkopf and A. J. Smola. Learning with Kernels. MIT Press, 2002.
B. Schölkopf, C. J. C. Burges, and A. J. Smola, editors. Advances in Kernel Methods--Support Vector Learning. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
A. J. Smola, P. L. Bartlett, B. Schölkopf, and D. Schuurmans, editors. Advances in Large Margin Classifiers. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000.

Biography

I studied physics in Munich at the University of Technology, Munich, at the Universita degli Studi di Pavia and at AT&T Research in Holmdel. During this time I was at the Maximilianeum München and the Collegio Ghislieri in Pavia. In 1996 I received the Master degree at the University of Technology, Munich and in 1998 the Doctoral Degree in computer science at the University of Technology Berlin. Until 1999 I was a researcher at the IDA Group of the GMD Institute for Software Engineering and Computer Architecture in Berlin (now part of the Fraunhofer Geselschaft). After that, I worked as a Researcher and Group Leader at the Research School for Information Sciences and Engineering of the Australian National University. From 2004 onwards I worked as a Senior Principal Researcher and Program Leader at the Statistical Machine Learning Program at NICTA.

Find Me

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Talks on Videolectures