Life of Peter Grünwald

Peter Grünwald's Mini-Resume

Click here for a full Resume.

Current Employment

Since November 2008: Part-Time Full Professor (0.2 fte) at Leiden University, Mathematical Institute, Statistical Learning Theory chair.
Since April 2005: Senior Researcher at CWI (currently 0.8 fte), under the NWO VIDI project Learning when all models are wrong; coordinator of the information-theoretic learning group (INS4.2).

Previous Employment, Education

July 2001-March 2005: Research Position at CWI. One day a week research fellow at EURANDOM.
1998-2001: various postdoc positions and extended stays abroad: Stanford University, California (1 year); EURANDOM, Eindhoven, the Netherlands (1.5 year); UCSC (University of California at Santa Cruz, 4 months)
1994-1998: Ph.D. student. Ph.D. in Mathematics and Computer Science obtained in 1998, University of Amsterdam (supervisor: Paul Vitányi).
1988-1994: bachelor and master's of Computer Science at the Free University of Amsterdam, six months spent at IRIT / Université Paul Sabatier in France.
1970: born in Geldrop, the Netherlands.

1994-now: Numerous shorter visits abroad, among which the University of Helsinki (CoSCo group, 2 months, 1997); Ohio State University, Columbus (1 month, 2003); University of Californa at Berkeley (1 month, 2008).

Publications -- Highlights

Peter Grünwald is author of the book The Minimum Description Length Principle, MIT Press, 2007, the first comprehensive overview of this exciting area. He has published in journals such as the Annals of Statistics, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Machine Learning, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and Journal of Mathematical Psychology, and in conferences such as NIPS, COLT, UAI, IJCAI and ISIT -- all of them among the main conferences in their respective fields (machine learning, reasoning under uncertainty, artificial intelligence, information theory).

Due to his involvement in the case of Lucia de Berk, he has been interviewed by Vrij Nederland (December 2006) and (twice) by Dutch public television (Een Vandaag) (March 2007, April 2008) and has been quoted in Nature (January 2007). He was mentioned on the front page of the daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad and in the Volkskrant (November 2007).

Click here for a list of all his publications.

Professional Recognition

Committees

general chair of UAI 2011 conference, co-program chair of UAI 2010 conference.
Chairman of the Jury of the VvS+OR Thesis Award (2011-now).
member DNA Advisory Committee of the Dutch Ministry of Justice for the to-be-created Dutch Register for Forensic Experts (since June 2009) ("DNA normstellende commissie van het Nederlands Register Gerechtelijk Deskundigen"). The task is to set formal requirements for experts testifying on DNA evidence in Dutch courts.
served on program and senior program committees of several major international conferences (e.g. ICML 2008, UAI 2001/2004, COLT 2002/2004/2007/2011, AISTATS 2005, AAAI 2006, ISIPTA 2005/2007, ECAI 2008).
steering committee member and workshop programme manager of the European Union Sixth Framework Network of Excellence PASCAL (2003-2008), and steering committee member of the successor network PASCAL-2 (2008-2012).
thesis co-adviser (with P. Vitanyi) of R. Cilibrasi (2007), S. de Rooij (2008), W. Koolen (2011, Cum Laude), and sole thesis advisor of T. van Erven (2010). Reading committee member for three more Ph.D. theses.
member of the review committee for the NWO VENI innovation grants (2008, 2009, 2010).

Awards, Prizes (highlights)

2010: co-recipient (with H. van Zanten) of the Van Dantzig Prize, the highest Dutch award in Statistics and Operations Research, handed out once every five years to a researcher not yet 40.
2010: NWO (NWO is the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) VICI-grant, for the project Safe Statistics.
2004: NWO VIDI-grant, for the project Learning when all models are wrong.
1999: Ph.D. thesis was co-awarded the 1999 FoLLI Outstanding Dissertation Prize for outstanding Ph.D. theses in the fields of Language, Logic and Computation.
1998: NWO TALENT-grant
various other travel and research grants (NWO and HSSS travel grants, NWO open competion and PASCAL pump priming research grants)

Invitations (a few highlights)

Invited speaker at the 2012 Bayes Lectures , Edinburgh, UK; the WITMSE 2012 Conference , Amsterdam, the Netherlands; the 2012 workshop on the Foundations on Ockham's Razor, Carnegie-Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA; ITW 2008, the 2008 Information Theory Workshop, Porto, Portugal; UAI and COLT 2008, Helsinki, Finland; BeNeLearn 2007 in Amsterdam, the 2005 Graybill Conference on Statistics in Information Technology in Colorado, the Amsterdam workshop on Model Selection,2004, University of Amsterdam, the Annual NVTI Dutch Theoretical Computer Science Day, Utrecht, 2004, the DIMACS workshop on Complexity and Inference, 2003, Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA, and ITW 2002, Bangalore, India, 2002.
Panel Member Tumult Debat and Kenniscafe about the role of the scientist as expert witness in court cases, November 2008, Utrecht.
Several Mini-Lectures on statistics at Beta en Recht (The Sciences and The Law), a workshop for Dutch judges and public prosecutors, 2010-2012.
Various invitations to both Dagstuhl (computer science) and Oberwolfach (mathematics) seminars.
Invited session organizer at the annual meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics), August 2006, Rio de Janeiro.
Invited lecturer at the 2003 summer school on machine learning, Max Planck Institut, Tübingen, Germany, 2003.

Peter Grünwald has given overview talks about and invited tutorials on MDL at several institutes.

Organized Workshops and Conferences

General chair of UAI 2011 conference, co-program chair of UAI 2010 conference. Co-organizer of the workshop EURANDOM 1998-2008: a decade of research (Eindhoven, the Netherlands, August 2008), Recent Breakthroughs in MDL Learning (Helsinki, Finland, July 2008). Also co-organizer of the EURANDOM/PASCAL workshop Notions of Complexity, Eindhoven, 2004; the EURANDOM Workshop on Statistical Learning in Classification and Model Selection, January 2003; co-organizer and workshop chair of the workshop on recent developments in MDL Methods, held during the 2001 annual NIPS (Neural Information Processing) conference. He was local co-chair of the 2001 COLT conference, held July 16-July 19 2001 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 1997 he was co-organizer of a Mini-Symposium on Model Selection, Bloomington, Indiana.

Last updated: July 2012.
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