Corinna Cortes facts for kids

Corinna Cortes, born on March 31, 1961, is a brilliant computer scientist from Denmark. She is famous for her important work in a field called machine learning. Today, she is a Vice President at Google Research in New York City. She has received special honors, like being an ACM Fellow and winning the Paris Kanellakis Award, for her amazing ideas about how machine learning works, especially with something called support vector machines.

Early Life and Education

Corinna Cortes was born in Denmark in 1961. She loved learning and studied physics at the University of Copenhagen, earning her Master's degree in 1989. Later, she moved to the United States to continue her studies.

She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1993. Her research there was guided by Professor Randal C. Nelson.

Career and Research

After finishing her PhD, Corinna Cortes joined AT&T Bell Labs as a researcher in 1993. This was a very important place for new technology at the time.

Since 2003, she has been a Vice President at Google Research in New York City. Google Research is where scientists work on new ideas for Google's products. Since 2011, she has also been a special professor at the UCPH Department of Computer Science in Denmark.

What is Machine Learning?

Corinna Cortes's research focuses on machine learning. This is a part of computer science that helps computers learn from data. It's like teaching a computer to recognize patterns or make predictions without being told every single step.

Support Vector Machines

One of her most important contributions is to support vector machines (SVMs). SVMs are a type of machine learning algorithm. They are used to sort data into different groups.

For example, SVMs can help computers tell the difference between pictures of cats and dogs. They are also used in many real-world applications. These include medical diagnosis (helping doctors find illnesses) and weather forecasting (predicting what the weather will be like).

Data Mining

Cortes also works on data mining. This is the process of finding patterns and useful information from large amounts of data. It helps us understand big collections of information.

Awards and Honors

Corinna Cortes has received several important awards for her work. These awards show how much her contributions have helped the field of computer science.

In 2008, she and Vladimir Vapnik jointly received the Paris Kanellakis Award. They won this award for creating a very effective algorithm. This algorithm is known as support vector machines (SVMs).

In 2023, she was named an ACM Fellow. This is a high honor given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She received it for her important ideas and practical work in machine learning. She was also recognized for her leadership in the industry and her service to the field.

Personal Life

Outside of her scientific work, Corinna Cortes has two children. She is also a competitive runner, showing her dedication and energy in sports as well as in science.