Corinna Cortes

Corinna Cortes. A Danish computer scientist renowned for her foundational contributions to machine learning and data mining. She is best known for her co-invention of the support vector machine (SVM) and her leadership in large-scale data analysis at Google Research. Her work has had a profound impact on both theoretical computer science and practical applications across the technology industry.

Early life and education

Cortes completed her early education in Denmark before pursuing higher studies in the United States. She earned a Master of Science degree in physics from the University of Copenhagen. She then moved to the University of Rochester in New York, where she obtained a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in computer science. Her doctoral research laid the groundwork for her future investigations into pattern recognition and computational learning theory.

Career and research

Cortes began her research career at AT&T Bell Laboratories, which later became AT&T Labs-Research. There, in collaboration with Vladimir Vapnik, she developed the modern formulation of the support vector machine, a seminal algorithm in supervised learning. This work was published in a highly influential 1995 paper in the journal Machine Learning. She later joined Google Research in New York City, where she ascended to the role of Head of Research. At Google, she led teams working on fundamental algorithms for large-scale systems, contributing significantly to projects like Google News and Google Translate. Her research interests also encompass online learning, ranking algorithms, and statistical learning theory.

Awards and honors

Cortes has received numerous prestigious awards for her contributions to computer science. In 2008, she and Vladimir Vapnik were jointly awarded the Paris Kanellakis Award from the Association for Computing Machinery for the theoretical and practical impact of the support vector machine. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers honored her with the Neural Networks Pioneer Award in 2016. She is also an elected Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Selected publications

Her extensive publication record includes key papers that have shaped the field of machine learning. Notable works include "Support-Vector Networks" in Machine Learning (1995) with Vladimir Vapnik. Another influential publication is "Boosting a Weak Learning Algorithm" in the Proceedings of the Annual Workshop on Computational Learning Theory. She has also co-authored textbooks and numerous articles in top-tier journals like the Journal of Machine Learning Research and conferences such as Neural Information Processing Systems.

Personal life

Cortes maintains a relatively private personal life while being an active participant in the global scientific community. She has been a dedicated advocate for increasing the participation of women in computer science and STEM fields. She frequently serves on the program committees of major conferences like the International Conference on Machine Learning and has given invited talks at institutions worldwide, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

Category:Danish computer scientists Category:Machine learning researchers Category:Google researchers