
Vladimir Vapnik Joins Facebook Research - gie
https://www.facebook.com/FBAIResearch/photos/a.360372474139712.1073741828.352917404885219/372090452967914/?type=1
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patkai
Am I the only one assuming that this many excellent scientists moving from
academia is a loss for science in general? Will they really publish research
in the same way they did before?

(Make no mistake, I can fully understand them, professors paid 80k per year,
lacking resources, fighting bureaucrats, it is a great thing that they are
recognised and at last paid what they deserve for devoting their lives to
science.)

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buttproblem
While I am curious too about your question, Vapnik was previously working in
industry at NEC Labs in New Jersey.

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patkai
Good point. But I do wonder about Facebook's journal publishing policy.

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iandanforth
This is another great example of the unreasonable effectiveness of data.
LeCunn, Hinton, Ng, Vapnik were all recruited on the basic fact that there is
simply no way to do cutting edge research today without access to the data and
computing resources of Google/Facebook/Yahoo/Baidu.

Edit: "No way" is inaccurate. I should have said it is much easier to do at
these companies. Also it is inaccurate to imply this is the only reason these
great minds have joined these companies.

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robrenaud
There is great, big data driven research coming out of Stanford using Common
Crawl. For example, see [http://www-
nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/](http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/projects/glove/)
. They successfully train an 840 billion token corpus.

Vapnik is a big theory guy. Though I am not sure he has done anything of big
practical importance recently, his immense contribution to ML (the SVM) was
done at a time when machines were many orders of magnitudes weaker than they
are now.

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mturmon
"In writing this book I had one more goal in mind: I wanted to stress the
practical power of abstract reasoning. The point is that during the last few
years at different computer science conferences, I heard reiteration of the
following claim:

    
    
      Complex theories do not work, simple algorithms do.
    

"One of the goals of this book is to show that, at least in the problems of
statistical inference, this is not true. I would like to demonstrate that in
this area of science a good old principle is valid:

    
    
      Nothing is more practical than a good theory.
    

\-- From Vapnik's preface to _The Nature of Statistical Learning Theory_

 __*

Vapnik is not well-described as a "theory guy". That implies that he's not
interested in connections between theory and practice, and this is most
profoundly not the case. He has arguably been the most successful ML
researcher ever as far as connecting abstract theory to real-world outcomes.

Besides the SVM: the VC dimension started out as a lemma regarding set
counting, and he pushed it to the surprising (even shocking) conclusion of
universal consistency for very general classes of estimators.

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robrenaud
I guess it depends on what kind of semantics you apply to "theory guy". In my
mind it's not at all dismissive.

I mean it in it a foundation sense, rather than an applications sense. He has
done great work with a whiteboard and pure thought, without the need for
terabytes of data and thousands of machines.

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mturmon
Remember, though, that the AT&T group Vladimir came from, and that informed
his work, was much in the mold of linking theory and practice. Where
"practice" (at that time) was working on the handwritten digit problem -- the
now-cliche NIST dataset.

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vrnut
I'm probably not the only VR nut who confused the person in the title with
Vladimir Vukićević, the Director of Engineering of Mozilla who has done worked
on some Oculus-centric web vr stuff for Mozilla.

[http://blog.bitops.com/blog/2014/06/26/first-steps-for-vr-
on...](http://blog.bitops.com/blog/2014/06/26/first-steps-for-vr-on-the-web/)

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vanderZwan
A few weeks ago an article on Nautil.us about innovations in machine learning.
Vladimir Vapnik was mentioned, specifically how he used poetry to teach a
machine handwriting. Very fascinating article in general:

[http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/teaching-me-
softly](http://nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/teaching-me-softly)

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dmmcenzie
Never heard of the guy. Who?

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cfrs
"The original SVM algorithm was invented by Vladimir N. Vapnik"
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Support_vector_machine)

