Bernhard Schölkopf receives BBVA Founda­tion Frontiers of Knowl­edge Award

On Febru­ary 19, 2020, Hector Fellow Bernhard Schölkopf along­side two other researchers received the BBVA Founda­tion Frontiers of Knowl­edge Award in the Infor­ma­tion and Commu­ni­ca­tions Technol­ogy category. The recip­i­ents were honored for their “funda­men­tal contri­bu­tions to machine learn­ing”. The award, which consists of 400,000 euros in prize money, will be presented at a formal ceremony, to be held in Bilbao on June 1 and June 2.

Accord­ing to the decision commit­tee, the research of the distin­guished scien­tists is “trans­form­ing the every­day world” and “improv­ing fields as diverse as medical diagno­sis, computer vision, natural language process­ing and the monitor­ing of climate change.” Accord­ing to the jury, Schölkopf has extended the range and perfor­mance of so-called support vector machines (SVM) by using kernel methods that allow the input of more specific categories, thereby multi­ply­ing applications.

Congrat­u­la­tions to Bernhard Schölkopf!