Curriculum Vitae

Alexander Johannes Smola
CEO and Co-Founder, Boson AI, Santa Clara, CA

Career

Dates Organization Role
since 2023 Boson AI, Santa Clara CEO and Co-Founder
2016-2023 Amazon Web Services, Santa Clara VP / Distinguished Scientist
2019-2020 UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor
2015-2016 Marianas Labs CEO / Founder
2013-2017 Carnegie Mellon University Full Professor
2012-2014 Google Research Visiting Scientist
2012-2013 UC Berkeley Adjunct Professor
2008-2012 Yahoo! Research, Santa Clara Principal Research Scientist
2004-2008 NICTA, Canberra; ANU Senior Principal Researcher; Adjunct Full Professor
2001-2004 ANU, RSISE, Canberra Researcher (Level C) / Group Leader
1999-2001 Australian National University, Canberra Postdoctoral Researcher
1996-1999 GMD FIRST, Berlin PhD Student
1995-1996 AT&T Research, Holmdel Intern
1991 Siemens AG, R&D, Munich Intern

Education

Dates Education
1997-1998 TU Berlin, PhD in Computer Science (summa cum laude). Thesis: “Learning with Kernels.”
1995-1996 AT&T Bell Labs. Thesis: “Regression with SV Machines” with Prof. V. Vapnik.
1994-1996 Technische Universität München. M.A. Physics, best in class.
1993-1994 Università degli Studi di Pavia, Italy. Exchange student.
1991-1993 Technische Universität München. B.A. Physics, best in class.

Books

Year Book
2020 Dive into Deep Learning, d2l.ai (Zhang, Li, Lipton, Smola)
2007 Predicting Structured Data (Bakir, Hofmann, Schölkopf, Smola, Taskar, Vishwanathan, eds., MIT Press)
2003 Machine Learning (Mendelson, Smola, eds., Springer)
2002 Learning with Kernels (Schölkopf, Smola, MIT Press)
2000 Advances in Large Margin Classifiers (Smola, Bartlett, Schölkopf, Schuurmans, eds., MIT Press)
1999 Advances in Kernel Methods (Schölkopf, Burges, Smola, eds., MIT Press)

Mentorship

Supervised approximately 75 PhD students, postdocs, and research scientists at ANU/NICTA, Yahoo!, CMU, and Amazon. The full list is available on the alumni page.

Workshops, Summer Schools and Conferences

Organized the Machine Learning Summer School in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2010, and 2015. Organized workshops at NeurIPS in 1997, 1998, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2015, and at SIGIR in 2010. Program Chair, KDD 2016. General Chair, MLSys 2020.

Publications

Over 250 peer-reviewed publications with more than 216,000 citations, h-index 144, and i10-index 375. See Google Scholar.