Congratulations to Professors John Robertson and Zoubin Ghahramani on their elections as Fellows of the Royal Society.
Professor Ghahramani is Professor of Information Engineering in the Computational and Biological Learning Laboratory. A leader in the field of machine learning, he has advanced the state of the art in algorithms that learn from data. His work focuses on understanding the mathematical, statistical and computational foundations of learning systems and how they can be used to build better learning algorithms. These machine learning algorithms form the basis of many recent advances in data science, artificial intelligence and computational modelling.
The Royal Society has recognised Professor Ghahramani as one of the pioneers of semi-supervised learning methods, active learning algorithms and sparse Gaussian processes. His development of novel infinite dimensional nonparametric models, such as the infinite latent feature model, has been highly influential.
“I am delighted to have received this honour and grateful to the many mentors, collaborators and students I have worked with over the years,” Professor Ghahramani said.
Professor John Robertson FRS is Professor of Electronic Engineering. The Royal Society has recognised Professor Robertson for his sustained contribution to the production and development of electronic devices.
Professor Robertson is an expert in electronic materials. He has calculated many of the key properties of HfO2 that led to it replacing SiO2 as the gate insulator in modern Field Effect Transistors (FETs). This enabled the continued 'Moore's Law' scaling of electronic devices. The HfO2 has a direct interface with the conducting Si channel, and the replacement has been described as like 'replacing the heart of the FET'.
He is a Fellow of the IEEE, the American Physical Society and of the Materials Research Society. He has published about 600 journal papers, with over 33,000 citations and is a ISI highly cited author in Materials Science. His research interests are in electronic materials in general, such materials for the CMOS gate stack, high dielectric constant oxides, thin film transistors including amorphous semiconducting oxides, carbon nanotubes, graphene, diamond-like carbon and CVD processes.
Professors Ghahramani and Robertson join four other 2015 Fellows from the University of Cambridge.
