Professor Alexey Chervonenkis

Brief Biography

It is with great sadness that we have to announce the death of Alexey Chervonenkis, Emeritus Professor in this department and a long-time member of the Computer Learning Research Centre. Alexey was an avid walker covering many miles around London, in other parts of Britain and the world, and especially in and around his native Moscow. On 21 September he went for a walk in Losiny Ostrov, a beautiful forest in Moscow, and lost his way. A search party was organized straight away. It included both professionals and more than a hundred of his colleagues and students, but they could not do anything; his body was found yesterday from a helicopter. Among Alexey's great scientific achievements are the development of the method of "generalized portrait", which was later further developed into the well-known Support Vector Machine, the derivation of necessary and sufficient conditions for the uniform convergence of the frequency of an event to its probability over a class of events, and the introduction of a new characteristic of a class of sets, later called the VC dimension. He was a great teacher and friend, and will be deeply missed.

Dr Chervonenkis made a long and outstanding contribution to the area of pattern recognition and computational learning. His first book on Pattern Recognition was published in 1974 (with Professor Vapnik) and he became an established authority in the field. Together they developed the whole new research area of ``statistical learning theory'' and pioneering ideas such as the inductive principle of structural risk minimization.

Dr Chervonenkis was working in the Research Institute of Control Problems at the Russian Academy of Science in Moscow for many years and won many prestigious prizes. Later he divided his time between the Academy and the Computer Learning Research Centre.

He was one of the invited speakers at the Colloquium "The Importance of being Learnable" hosted by the Computer Learning Research Centre at Royal Holloway in September 1998.

Electronic Papers

The following papers are available on this site, in postscript format.

• Some properties of infinite VC-dimension systems, published in the Dagstuhl Seminar Report, 1999.
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• Covariance function for Shrodinger equations function, CLRC technical report TR-01-03, 2001.
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• Change of Support Problem, unpublished 2001.
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• On a Strange Property of the Order 1 Varogramm, unpublished 2001.
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• About some properties of function sets, for which the condition of uniform convergence of means to expectations are not valid 2006.

Publications