Alex Smola Joins the Machine Learning Department

Professor Alex Smola

Professor Smola's research interests span several areas--scalability of algorithms, support vector machines, conditional random fields, statistical modeling, and applications to solve real-world problems. Alex studied physics in Munich at the Universita degli Studi di Pavia and at AT&T Research in Holmdel. He received his Master degree at University of Technology, Munich and his PhD in computer science at the University of Technology Berlin in 1998.

He's worked as a Researcher and Group Leader at the Research School for Information Sciences and Engineering of the Australian National University.

Alex has also been a Senior Principal Researcher and Program Leader at the Statistical Machine Learning Program at NICTA and from 2008 to 2012, he worked at Yahoo! Research before he moved to Google Research Mountain View.  

Alex joined the ML department January 2013 and is currently teaching 10-701 Machine Learning, along with Professor Barnabás Póczos. He enjoys travel and photography.