Vladimir Naumovich Vapnik is one of the main developers of statistical learning theory. He was born in Russia; received a master's degree in mathematics from the Uzbek State University in Samarkand, in 1958; and received a Ph.D in statistics from the Institute of Control Science in Moscow, in 1964. At AT&T Bell Labs (later Shannon Labs) from 1991 through 2001?, Vapnik and his colleagues developed the theory of the support vector machine. They demonstrated its performance on a number of problems of interest to the machine learning community, including handwriting recognition. He is currently at NEC Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and also Princeton University.
