John Langford (computer scientist)

{{Short description|American computer scientist}}

{{other people|John Langford}}

John Langford (born January 2, 1975) is a computer scientist working in machine learning and learning theory, a field that he says, "is shifting from an academic discipline to an industrial tool".{{cite web | url=http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/msrnyc-050212.aspx | author=Knies, Rob | title=Microsoft Research Debuts N.Y.C. Lab | date=May 2, 2012 | accessdate=July 18, 2012}}

He is well known for work on the Isomap embedding algorithm, CAPTCHA challenges, Cover Trees for nearest neighbor search, Contextual Bandits (which he coined{{cite web | url=http://papers.nips.cc/paper/3178-the-epoch-greedy-algorithm-for-multi-armed-bandits-with-side-information.pdf | author=Langford, John |author2=Zhang, Tong| title=The Epoch-Greedy Algorithm for ContextualMulti-armed Bandits | date=December 3, 2007}}) for reinforcement learning applications,{{cite book | chapter-url=https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1772758 | author=Li, Lihong |author2=Chu, Wei |author3=Langford, John |author4=Schapire, Robert E. | title=Proceedings of the 19th international conference on World wide web - WWW '10 | chapter=A contextual-bandit approach to personalized news article recommendation | date=April 26, 2010| page=661 | doi=10.1145/1772690.1772758 | arxiv=1003.0146 | isbn=9781605587998 | s2cid=207178795 }} and learning reductions.{{cite web | url=http://hunch.net/?p=17 | author=Langford, John | title=The State of the Reduction | date=February 7, 2005}}

John is the author of the blog [http://www.hunch.net/ hunch.net] and the principal developer of Vowpal Wabbit. He works at Microsoft Research New York, of which he was one of the founding members, and was previously affiliated with Yahoo! Research, Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago, and IBM's Watson Research Center. He studied Physics and Computer Science at the California Institute of Technology, earning a double bachelor's degree in 1997, and he received his Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in 2002.

John was the program co-chair for the 2012 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML),{{cite web | url=https://icml.cc/Conferences/2016/index.html%3Fp=39.html | author=Francesco, Figari | title=ICML 2012 program committee | date=2012}} general chair for the 2016 ICML,{{cite web | url=https://icml.cc/Conferences/2016/index.html%3Fp=39.html | author=Mary, Jérémie | title=ICML 2016 organizing committee | date=2016}} and is the president of ICML{{cite web | url=https://icml.cc/Conferences/2020/Board | author=Campbell, Lee | title=ICML 2020 Board | date=2019}} from 2019 to 2021.