Dr. Shai Ben David

Biography

Shai Ben-David grew up in Jerusalem, Israel. He attended Hebrew University where he studied physics, mathematics, and psychology. He received his PhD under the supervision of Saharon Shelah and Menachem Magidor, focusing on set theory. Professor Ben-David was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto in the Mathematics and Computer Science departments. In 1987, he joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology). He has held visiting faculty positions at the Australian National University in Canberra from 1997 to 1998 and at Cornell University from 2001 to 2004. In August 2004, he joined the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo. His research interests span a wide spectrum of topics within the foundations of computer science and its applications, with a particular emphasis on statistical and computational machine learning. The common thread of his research aims to provide a mathematical formulation and understanding of real-world problems, and he is particularly focused on the popular machine learning data mining paradigms that seem to lack clear theoretical justification.

Research Interests