Faculty - Dr. Shai Ben-David
PhD - Hebrew University
Professor Part Time
Shai Ben-David He received his PhD in mathematics from the Hebrew university, Jerusalem. Dr. Ben-David was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in the Mathematics and the Computer Science departments, and in 1987 joined the faculty of the CS Department at the Technion (Israel Institute Technology). He held visiting faculty positions at the Australian National University in Canberra (1997-8) and at Cornell University (2001-2004). In August 2004 he joined the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.
Dr. Ben-David is a frequent member of the program committees of all the major machine learning conferences and has served as the program chair in most. He is a member of the editorial board of the journals Theoretical computer Science and Information and Computation and has been an action editor for the machine Lerning Journal. Currently Dr. Ben-David is he president of the Association of Computational Learning that runs the COLT conference. My research interests span a wide spectrum of topics in the foundations of computer science and its applications, with a particular emphasis on statistical and computational machine learning. The common thread throughout my research is the interplay between mathematical theories and real world problems.
In recent years much of my research has been directed towards providing mathematical analysis for popular machine learning and data mining paradigms that seem to lack clear theoretical justification. Examples of topics I have looked into include performance guarantees for Support Vector Machines, Semi-Supervised Learning, and domain adaptation in learning. Clustering is another large area of high practical significance but meager mathematical foundations. I have been working extensively trying to address the challenge of developing theoretical foundations for clustering.