Ralf Herbrich

In general, I want my work to have a positive impact to many people's lives. I particularly enjoy the application of principled research to large-scale real-world problems. I enjoy learning new things every day and getting to work with (new) people. I fundamentally believe in a people-first approach: As a scientist, I want to solve problems that people really have - also called "working backwards" and "customer-obsession"; as a manager, I always put people (development) over project (success) - the former being "the end" and the latter being "the means" (not the other way around); as a scientific leader, I always prefer to discuss ideas with another scientist over just reading their work - learning happens faster and in a more sustained way in a dialog rather than in reading. I do not accept existing scientific boundaries and think that the largest breakthroughs will be made at the intersection of existing disciplines. My research interests include Bayesian inference and decision making, game theory, information retrieval, natural language processing, computer vision, distributed systems, learning theory and knowledge representation and reasoning. I have published over 80 peer reviewed conference and journal papers in these fields. I am one of the inventors of the Drivatars™ system in the Forza Motorsport series as well as the TrueSkill™ ranking and matchmaking system in Xbox 360 Live. I also co-invented the click-prediction technology used in bing's online advertising system (adPredictor) which is used widely in the industry now. I am co-inventor for several patents relating to these inventions.