Francis Bach

Francis Bach is a researcher at Inria and since 2011 has headed the statistical learning (machine learning) team of the Computer Science Department of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), which is a joint venture between CNRS, ENS and Inria. He has been an adjunct professor at ENS since 2016. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique (1997) and obtained his PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley in 2005, under the supervision of Professor Michael Jordan. After two years at the Mathematical Morphology Center of the Ecole des Mines de Paris, he joined the CNRS/ENS/Inria computer vision team from 2007 to 2010.
He is mainly interested in algorithmic and theoretical aspects of machine learning, and more specifically in parsimonious methods, kernel-based methods, large-scale optimization, computer vision and signal processing.
Francis Bach was awarded a Starting Grant in 2009 and a Consolidator Grant in 2016 from the European Research Council. He received the Inria Young Researcher Award in 2012, the "test-of-time ICML" prize in 2014, as well as the Lagrange Prize in Continuous Optimization in 2018 and the Jean-Jacques Moreau Prize in 2019. In 2015, he was co-chair of the program committee of the International Conference in Machine Learning (ICML) and its president in 2018. He is currently co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR).