Vladimir Vapnik is one of the main developers of Statistical Learning Theory[?]. He was born in Russia; received a Master's Degree in Mathematics from the Uzbek State University in Samarkand, in 1958; and received a Ph.D in Statistics from the Institute of Control Science in Moscow, in 1964. At AT&T Bell (later Shannon) Labs from 1991 through 2001?, Vapnik and his colleagues developed the theory of the Support Vector Machine. They demonstrated its performance on a number of problems of interest to the machine learning community, including handwriting recognition. He is currently at NEC Laboratories in Princeton, New Jersey, and also Princeton University.