Shai Ben-david

Biography

Dr. Shai Ben-David is a Professor in the Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, University Avenue West, Waterloo, ON, Canada.

Research Interest

Professor Ben-David's research interests span a wide spectrum of topics in the foundations of computer science and its applications, with a particular emphasis on statistical and computational machine learning. The common thread throughout my research is the quest for mathematical foundations of real world problems. In recent years much of my research has been directed towards providing mathematical analysis for popular machine learning and data mining paradigms that seem to lack solid theoretical justification. I have looked into the performance guarantees one can provide for Support Vector Machines (with pessimistic conclusions), at Semi-Supervised Learning (once again, coming up with some inherent limitations of that approach), at the problem of domain adaptation paradigm (providing the first theoretical justifications to common practices), change detection in streaming data, at the Stability method for determining the number of clusters in a data set (see my COLT06, COLT07 and COLT08 papers on that issue), and quite a few more topics. Clustering is a very wide research area, with many practical application, that also suffers from the lack of mathematical foundations. I have been working extensively trying to address the challenge of developing a theory that provides guidelines for choosing an appropriate clustering technique for a given task (see my recent papers with Ackerman et al).