Dr. Shai Ben David

Biography

Shai Ben-David grew up in Jerusalem, Israel, and attended Hebrew University, studying physics, mathematics, and psychology. He received his PhD under the supervision of Saharon Shelah and Menachem Magidor, with a thesis focused on set theory. After completing his doctorate, Professor Ben-David became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto, contributing to both the Mathematics and Computer Science departments. In 1987, he joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology). Over the years, he has held visiting faculty positions at the Australian National University in Canberra (1997-1998) and Cornell University (2001-2004). He began his current role at the School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in August 2004. His research interests span a wide spectrum of topics within the foundations of computer science, with a particular emphasis on statistical and computational machine learning. A common thread throughout his research is the aim to provide a mathematical formulation to understand real-world problems, and in particular, he is focused on popular machine learning and data mining paradigms that seem to lack clear theoretical justification.

Research Interests

Experience