A special session at the Symposium will be devoted to the memory of Alexey Chervonenkis, who tragically died in September 2014
Alexey Yakovlevich Chervonenkis
7 September 1938 - 22 September 2014
Professor Alexey 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 Vladimir 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.
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.
Alexey 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.
Alexey was appointed as Professor of Computer Science at Royal Holloway, University of London and Computer Learning Research Centre (CLRC) in 2000 and participated since then in many research projects at the CLRC. Among the most interesting ones were a combination of the Bayesian and maximum likelihood approaches to regularization, the development of a new method for recognition of promoter regions using string kernels, and exploring properties of systems with infinite VC dimension. Since 2010 Alexey was Emeritus Professor at Royal Holloway, University of London.
In 2007 Alexey started lecturing at the School of Data Analysis founded by Yandex — the Russian version of Google. The lectures were published as the book “Computer Data Analysis”. Since 2011 he also was working on a part-time basis at Yandex itself developing machine learning algorithms related to promotion of advertisements. In 2013 he presented two invited talks at big international conferences: the conference on data analysis organised by Yandex in Moscow and the conference "Artificial Intelligence Applications and Innovations". In 2013 and 2014 he was an honorary chair of the workshop "Conformal Prediction and its Applications".