Life of Peter Grünwald

Peter Grünwald's Mini-Resume

Click here for a full Resume.

History

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, under the NWO VIDI project Learning when all models are wrong; coordinator of the information-theoretic learning group (INS4.2).
September-December 2001: four months visit to UCSC (University of California at Santa Cruz), (Manfred Warmuth and David Draper).
July 2001-March 2005: Research Position at CWI. One day a week research fellow at EURANDOM.
1999-2001: Postdoc Position at EURANDOM, the Netherlands.
1998-1999: Postdoc Position at Stanford University, California.
1998: Ph.D. degree in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Amsterdam.
1994-1998: Ph.D. Student at the CWI (Dutch Centre of Mathematics and Computer Science) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands; supervisor: Professor Paul Vitányi.
1994: Graduation Cum Laude in Computer Science at the Free University of Amsterdam.
1993-1994: Six months visit to the IRIT / Université Paul Sabatier in France
1988-1994: studying Computer Science at the Free University of Amsterdam.
1982-1988: Grammar school at the Lorentz Lyceum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
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, 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 B., 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

co-program chair of UAI 2010 conference.
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 the program committee of several major international conferences (e.g. ICML 2008, UAI 2001/2004, COLT 2002/2004/2007, 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) and S. de Rooij (2008), and reading committee member for three more Ph.D. theses.
member of the review committee for the NWO VENI innovation grants (2008, 2009).

Awards, Prizes (highlights)

2004: NWO VIDI-grant (NWO is the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research), 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)
Both the 'propaedeutic' and the 'drs.' (master's) degree in Computer Science were obtained cum laude.

Invitations (a few highlights)

Various invitations to both Dagstuhl (computer science) and Oberwolfach (mathematics) seminars.
Panel Member Tumult Debat and Kenniscafe about the role of the scientist as expert witness in court cases, November 2008, Utrecht.
Mini-Lecture on statistics at Beta en Recht (The Sciences and The Law), a workshop for Dutch judges, March 2010, Amsterdam (planned).
Invited session organizer at the annual meeting of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics), August 2006, Rio de Janeiro.
Invited speaker at 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.
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

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; he was 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: December 2009.
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