Peter Grünwald

Peter Grünwald

Peter Grünwald heads the information-theoretic learning group at the Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica (CWI), the Dutch national research institute for mathematics and computer science, located in Amsterdam. He is also part-time full professor (a very Dutch construction) at Leiden University. His research interests lie where statistics, computer science and information theory meet: theories of learning from data. He is author of the book The Minimum Description Length Principle, MIT Press, June 2007. April 2010 he was co-awarded the Van Dantzig prize. Until July 2010 he headed the NWO VIDI research project Learning when All Models are Wrong. As of July 2010, he heads the NWO VICI project Safe Statistics. He is a steering committee member of the EU PASCAL Network of Excellence.

General Information:

Other (Somewhat) Recent Issues

I was general chair of UAI 2011 and co-program chair of UAI 2010, the annual conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, a conference on the interface between Computer Science and Statistics.
Lucia de B. is a nurse who has been convicted for murdering or attempting to murder 10 patients, based to a large extent on flawed medical and flawed statistical evidence. I am part of a group of concerned philosophers, medical doctors, statisticians and others who have been actively involved in trying to reopen the case. By far the most active among these people are Metta de Noo, Ton Derksen and Richard Gill. After more than six years in prison, on April 2nd, 2008, Lucia was temporarily released. October 2008, the Supreme Court of the Netherlands decided that the case will be reopened. March 17th, 2010, the public prosecution asked the judges to overturn the conviction. Finally!

OLD:

How many people have ever lived on earth? See here (in Dutch).
My book, The Minimum Description Length Principle, MIT Press, June 2007. This book is the first comprehensive introduction and reference guide to this exciting paradigm for statistics and machine learning.
This sample chapter of the above book contains extensive discussion about how MDL relates to other statistical (Bayesian, frequentist, machine learning) methods.
2010 class on information-theoretic learning at Leiden University.
My (by now very old) pro-European Union manifesto Reflections on the European Constitution (edited and translated into English by W. Grünsteidl with help from R. Cilibrasi). This text was written May 2005, one week before the Dutch vote on the EU constitution. It has helped to convince several of my friends and colleagues to vote Yes - although of course a large majority of the Dutch still voted no.

Prof. Dr. Peter Grünwald
CWI
P.O. Box 94079
NL-1090 GB Amsterdam
The Netherlands
Telephone +31-20-5924115
Telefax + 31-20-5924312
E-mail pdg@cwi.nl
URL www.grunwald.nl

Last updated: May 2011.