Corinna Cortes is a Danish computer scientist and a Vice President in Google Research, where, according to her profile, she focuses on theoretical and applied large-scale machine learning problems. She earned an MS in physics from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1993.
Cortes is best known for co-inventing the support vector machine. With Vladimir Vapnik she co-authored the 1995 paper “Support-Vector Networks,” which introduced the soft-margin classifier that made SVMs practical on noisy, real-world data. The method dominated machine learning through the late 1990s and 2000s before deep learning rose to prominence. For this work she and Vapnik jointly received the 2008 Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award.
Before Google, Cortes spent more than ten years at AT&T Labs - Research, formerly AT&T Bell Labs, where she held a distinguished research position. At Google she has helped lead a large research organization spanning the theory and engineering of machine learning systems.