Biography:Radford M. Neal

Short description: Canadian computer scientist and statistician (born 1956)

Radford M. Neal
Born	(1956-09-12) September 12, 1956
Citizenship	Canadian
Education	University of Calgary University of Toronto
Scientific career
Fields	Statistics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence
Institutions	University of Toronto
Thesis	Bayesian Learning for Neural Networks (1995)
Doctoral advisor	Geoffrey Hinton
Other academic advisors	David Hill
Website	www.cs.utoronto.ca/~radford/

Radford M. Neal is a professor emeritus at the Department of Statistics and Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, where he holds a research chair in statistics and machine learning.

Education and career

Neal studied computer science at the University of Calgary, where he received his B.Sc. in 1977 and M.Sc. in 1980, with thesis work supervised by David Hill. He worked for several years as a sessional instructor at the University of Calgary and as a statistical consultant in the industry before coming back to the academia. Neal continued his study at the University of Toronto, where he received his Ph.D. in 1995 under the supervision of Geoffrey Hinton. Neal became an assistant professor at the University of Toronto in 1995, an associated professor in 1999 and a full professor since 2001. He was the Canada Research Chair in Statistics and Machine Learning from 2003 to 2016 and retired in 2017.

Neal has made great contributions in the area of machine learning and statistics, where he is particularly well known for his work on Markov chain Monte Carlo,<ref> {{cite report | last = Neal | first = Radford | title = Probabilistic Inference Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods | pages = 144

Bibliography

Books and chapters

• Neal, Radford M. (1996). Bayesian learning for neural networks. New York: Springer. ISBN 0-387-94724-8. OCLC 34894370. https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/34894370. 
• Neal, Radford M. (2011-05-10). MCMC using Hamiltonian dynamics. doi:10.1201/b10905. ISBN 9780429138508. Bibcode: 2011hmcm.book..113N. 

Selected papers

• Witten, Ian H.; Neal, Radford M.; Cleary, John G. (1987). "Arithmetic coding for data compression" (in en). Communications of the ACM 30 (6): 520–540. doi:10.1145/214762.214771. ISSN 0001-0782. 
• Hinton, Geoffrey E.; Dayan, Peter; Frey, Brendan J.; Neal, Radford M. (1995-05-26). "The "Wake-Sleep" Algorithm for Unsupervised Neural Networks" (in en). Science 268 (5214): 1158–1161. doi:10.1126/science.7761831. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 7761831. Bibcode: 1995Sci...268.1158H. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7761831. 
• Dayan, Peter; Hinton, Geoffrey E.; Neal, Radford M.; Zemel, Richard S. (1995). "The Helmholtz Machine" (in en). Neural Computation 7 (5): 889–904. doi:10.1162/neco.1995.7.5.889. ISSN 0899-7667. PMID 7584891. https://direct.mit.edu/neco/article/7/5/889-904/5898. 
• Neal, Radford M. (2000). "Markov Chain Sampling Methods for Dirichlet Process Mixture Models". Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 9 (2): 249–265. doi:10.2307/1390653. ISSN 1061-8600. https://www.jstor.org/stable/1390653. 
• Neal, Radford M. (2001). "Annealed importance sampling". Statistics and Computing 11 (2): 125–139. doi:10.1023/A:1008923215028. http://link.springer.com/10.1023/A:1008923215028. 
• Neal, Radford M. (2003-06-01). "Slice sampling". The Annals of Statistics 31 (3). doi:10.1214/aos/1056562461. ISSN 0090-5364. 
• Jain, Sonia; Neal, Radford M. (2007-09-01). "Splitting and merging components of a nonconjugate Dirichlet process mixture model". Bayesian Analysis 2 (3). doi:10.1214/07-BA219. ISSN 1936-0975. 
• Shahbaba, Babak; Lan, Shiwei; Johnson, Wesley O.; Neal, Radford M. (2014). "Split Hamiltonian Monte Carlo" (in en). Statistics and Computing 24 (3): 339–349. doi:10.1007/s11222-012-9373-1. ISSN 0960-3174. http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11222-012-9373-1.