Ralf Herbrich

Ralf Herbrich is Director of Machine Learning at Amazon. From 2011 to 2012, he worked at Facebook leading the Unified Ranking and Allocation team building large-scale machine learning infrastructure for learning user-action-rate predictors that enabled unified value experiences across Facebook products.From 2009 to 2011, he was Director of Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab UK working on the development of computational intelligence technologies on large online data collections. Before that, Ralf worked for 9 years at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Ralf joined Microsoft Research in 2000 as a Postdoctoral researcher and Research Fellow of the Darwin College Cambridge. Ralf has published over 80 papers and holds over 30 patents. His research interests include Bayesian inference and decision making, kernel methods, statistical learning theory, distributed systems and programming languages. Ralf is one of the inventors of the Drivatars™ system in the Forza Motorsport series as well as the TrueSkill™ ranking and matchmaking system in Xbox 360 Live. He also co-invented the adPredictor click-prediction technology launched in 2009 in Bing's online advertising system