Professor, Australian National University
Senior Principal Researcher, NICTA
Track record
Academic
My research on Support Vector Machines and kernel methods has shaped the progress in this area.
Consequently it found its way into textbooks. One of my own books has become standard course material
for kernel methods. There is hardly an aspect of kernel methods which I have not contributed to, be it
optimization, statistical properties, theory, applications, teaching, or organization of events. Kernels allow
one to design a large number of estimators which show superior
flexibility and ease of use.
Community
I have served on several senior program committees in NIPS, COLT, and
ICML. In addition to that, I am member of the editorial boards of the
Journal of Machine Learning Research, Statistics and Computing, and
the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Recognition and Machine
Intelligence. I have reviewed for every major conference and journal
in the area of machine learning.
Teaching and Supervision
Over the past decade I have (co)supervised and am supervising several PhD students, among those
Ying Guo, Cheng Soon Ong, Omri Guttman, Justin Bedo, Karsten Borgwardt (de facto), Le Song (de
facto), Markus Weimer (de facto), Matthew Robard, Quoc Le, Choon Hui Teo, Owen Thomas, Tim Sears, Novi Quadrianto
and Javen Qinfeng Shi.
Grants
In the past I have held 7 grants of the Australian
Research Council, with a total of approximately 1.5 Million AU$. In
addition to that, I held a postdoctoral grant of the German Research
Foundation, and grants by the German National Scholarship
Foundation. Finally, the Statistical Machine Learning Program holds a
European Union collaborative grant as part of a European network of
excellence in machine learning.
In my role as a Program Leader in NICTA I am responsible for an annual budget of 1.5 to 2 Million AU$.
Leadership
My recent position as program leader of the
Statistical Machine Learning Program at NICTA involved leading a team
of up to 35 researchers, programmers, PhD students, visitors, and
interns (the numbers fluctuate widely, since SML had a large number of
visitors and its team members are internationally well connected).
During my leadership the size of the program has trebled.
Career
- 2004-08
NICTA, Canberra Research Laboratory, Australia
Statistical Machine Learning Program leader, (11 academics, 3 programmers, 10 PhD students, 1 sabbatical visitor) - 2001-04
Australian National University, Canberra, Research School for
Information Sciences and Engineering
Machine Learning Group, Leader, (3 academics, 1 PhD student) - 1999-01 Australian National University, Canberra, Deptartment of Engineering, Visiting Researcher (DFG Grant)
- 1998-99
GMD FIRST, Berlin, Department of Software Engineering
Postdoctoral Researcher - 1996-98
GMD FIRST, Berlin, Department of Software Engineering
PhD Student - 1995-96
AT&T Research, Holmdel
Intern (final year's project) - 1991
Siemens AG, Research and Development, Munich, Germany
Intern
Grants
- 2004-08 Pascal European Union network of excellence in machine learning ($30k per annum)
- 2007-09
Australian Research Council, Chief Investigator
Unifying Machine Learning with Prof. Bob Williamson ($250k total) - 2003-05
Australian Research Council, Chief Investigator
Computer Vision and Machine Learning with Prof. Richard Hartley ($250k total) - 2003-05
Australian Research Council, Chief Investigator
Network Intrusion Detection via Machine Learning ($165k total) - 2002-04
Australian Research Council, Chief Investigator
Machine Learning with Prof. Bob Williamson and Dr. Shahar Mendelson ($220k total) - 2001
Australian Research Council, Faculty Research Granst Scheme, Principal Investigator
Finding Genes with Kernel Methods ($25k total)- 2000 Australian Research Council, Faculty Research Granst Scheme, Principal Investigator
Unsupervised Learning with Kernels ($20k total)- 1999-2001 Australian Research Council, Associate Investigator
Large Margin Classifiers ($240k total) with Prof. Bob Williamson and Prof. Peter Bartlett- 1999-2001 Telstra Research Grant
Machine Learning and Data Mining with Prof. Bob Williamson, Prof. Peter Bartlett and Dr. Jon Baxter ($60k total)- 1999-2001 German Research Council (DFG), Postdoctoral Fellowship
Applicable Learning Theory ($100k total)
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.
Education
- 1997-98 Technische Universität Berlin, PhD Thesis in Computer Science (summa cum laude) on Learning with Kernels, Supervisor Prof. Klaus-Robert Müller
- 1995-96 AT&T Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, Thesis on Regression with SV Machines, Supervisor Prof. Vladimir Vapnik
- 1994-95 Technische Universität München, best Physics MA, score 1.0 in range [1.0-5.0]
- 1993-94 Universita degli Studi di Pavia
- 1991-93 Technische Universität München, best Physics BA, score 1.0 in range [1.0-5.0]
Workshops and Summer Schools
- 2002, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2008 Machine Learning Summer School Canberra
- 2004 Machine Learning Summer School Berder
- 2006 Machine Learning Summer School Taipeh
- 2007 NIPS Workshop on Representations of Distributions
- 2004 NIPS Workshop on Kernels and Graphical Models
- 2002 NIPS Workshop on Unreal Data
- 1999 ICANN Workshop on Gaussian Processes and Support Vectors
- 1998 NIPS Workshop on Large Margin Classifiers
- 1998 EUROCOLT Workshop on Kernel Methods
- 1997 NIPS Workshop on Support Vectors
Refereeing
I am a member of the editorial board of- the Journal of Machine Learning Research
- Statistics and Computing
- IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
In addition to that I have served as a member of the program committees of
- the conference on Computational Learning Theory (COLT) 2002, 2006, 2008
- the conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 2003, 2008 (workshop chair)
- the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2002, 2004, 2005, and 2006.
In addition to that I am a member of the advisory board (and co-founder) of Kernel-Machines.org. Finally, I am a referee for grants of the Australian Research Council.