Nello Cristianini
Nello Cristianini (born 1968) is a Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol. Education. Cristianini holds a degree in physics from the University of Trieste, a Master in computational intelligence from the University of London and a PhD from the University of Bristol. Previously he has been an associate professor at the University of California, Davis, and held visiting positions at other universities. Research. His research contributions encompass the fields of machine learning, artificial intelligence and bioinformatics. Particularly, his work has focused on statistical analysis of learning algorithms, to its  application to support vector machines, kernel methods and other algorithms. Cristianini is the co-author of two widely known books in machine learning, "An Introduction to Support Vector Machines" and "Kernel Methods for Pattern Analysis" and a book in bioinformatics, "Introduction to Computational Genomics". Recent research has focused on the big-data analysis of newspapers content, the analysis of social media content, and the ethical implication of data-driven approaches to science and society. Previous research had focused on unified theoretical frameworks for statistical pattern analysis; machine learning and artificial intelligence; machine translation; bioinformatics. As a practitioner of data-driven  AI and Machine Learning, Cristianini frequently gives public talks about the need for a deeper ethical understanding of the effects of modern data-science on society. Awards and honours. Cristianini is a recipient of the Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award and a current holder of a European Research Council Advanced Grant. In June 2014, Cristianini was included in a list of the "most influential scientists of the decade" compiled by Thomson Reuters (listing the top one per cent of scientists who are "the world’s leading scientific minds" and whose publications are among the most influential in their fields ). In December 2016 he was included in the list of Top100 most influential researchers in Machine Learning by AMiner. In 2017, Cristianini was the keynote speaker at the Annual STOA Lecture at the European Parliament.