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Professor Ray Solomonoff (1926 - 2009)

R. Solomonoff photo
Position Visiting Professor
Email rjsolo@ieee.org
Research Area Inductive Inference
Personal WebPage Click Here

Brief Biography

Ray Solomonoff carried out fundamental research in the fields of inductive inference and machine learning, the best known being his discovery in 1960 of Algorithmic Probability - a very general system for defining regularities in data and quantifying the process of making theories. Algorithmic Probability has subsequently been approximated and modified by others in many forms - such as Kolmogorov Complexity, Minimum Description Length, Minimum Message Length, etc.

After attending the 1956 Dartmouth workshop on Artificial Intelligence, he published "An Inductive Inference Machine" - one of the earliest papers on machine learning. His subsequent development of Algorithmic Probability made it possible to put this earlier work on machine learning in a more exact, more general form.

He continued to expand this theory and develop applications for it - the major focus being on machine learning.

He was principal scientist at Oxbridge Research, Cambridge, Mass since 1974, and was one of the invited speakers at the Colloquium "The Importance of Being Learnable" hosted by the Computer Learning Research Center at Royal Holloway in September 1998.

In 2003, he gave the Inaugural Kolmogorov Lecture, also at Royal Holloway.

Selected List of Publications


Last updated Wed, 30-Dec-2009 18:40 GMT
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