Corinna Cortes (born March 31, 1961, in Denmark) is a Danish-American computer scientist and researcher in artificial intelligence known for her contributions to machine learning and data mining, including work on support vector machines (SVM) and the MNIST database.^[1,2] She received a master's degree in physics from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen in 1989 and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester under advisor Randal C. Nelson with the dissertation "Prediction of generalization ability in learning machines", dated to 1993 according to Danish Wikipedia and 1994 according to English and Chinese Wikipedia.

Cortes worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Laboratories for a number of years.^[4] In 1995, together with Vladimir Vapnik, she published the scientific paper "Support vector networks".^[3] She serves as a Vice President and head (director) of Google Research in New York City.^[2,12,13,15] In 2011, Cortes became an adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen, where she was appointed an honorary alumna in 2014.^[2,5] In 2014, she also investigated the reproducibility of peer review for the NIPS scientific conference together with Neil Lawrence.

For her work on the theoretical foundations of support vector machines, she was awarded the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award in 2008, and she was named an ACM Fellow in 2023.^[2,15,11] In her spare time, Cortes is a long-distance runner who has recorded a marathon time of 3:07:44.^[6]

Corinna Cortes was born in Denmark on March 31, 1961. In 1989, she obtained a Master of Science degree in physics from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen.^[12] The same year, she joined as a researcher and stayed there for about ten years. She earned her PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1993 under the supervision of Randal C. Nelson, with a thesis titled Prediction of generalization ability in learning machines.^[19,12] She is the director of Google Research in New York and a member of the editorial board of the journal Machine Learning.^[20]

Corinna Cortes studied physics in Copenhagen, where she earned her diploma from the Niels Bohr Institute in 1989, and later received her doctorate in computer science from the University of Rochester in 1993.^[7] Sources differ on when she began working at Bell Labs: German and Ukrainian Wikipedia state that she started at AT&T Bell Laboratories in 1989 and remained there for roughly a decade, while English and Chinese Wikipedia state she joined as a researcher in 1993. During her tenure at AT&T, Cortes contributed to the design of the Hancock programming language and was awarded the AT&T Science and Technology Medal in 2000 for her work on data mining in large datasets.^[17]

Since 2003, she has worked at Google in New York City, serving as Vice President and head of Google Research.^[8,15,14] She took on an academic appointment as an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (UCPH) starting in 2011, which French Wikipedia reports concluded in 2014, whereas English and Chinese Wikipedia present it as an ongoing role.^[15,2,14] She also serves as an editorial board member of the journal Machine Learning.^[14,15] In 2014, she was named an honorary alumna of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen (DIKU) and was appointed by the Danish Minister of Education and Research to a three-year term on the board of directors of the Danish National Innovation Fund.

Cortes's research focuses broadly on machine learning, databases, and search algorithms, with significant contributions to data mining and support vector machines (SVM).^[18] Support vector machines have become one of the most widely used algorithms in machine learning, finding practical applications in areas such as medical diagnostics and weather forecasting.^[2,22,28] In 2008, Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik jointly received the Paris Kanellakis Award for Theory and Practice from the Association for Computing Machinery for their development of SVM as a highly efficient supervised learning algorithm.^[21,27]

In 2008, Cortes and Vladimir Vapnik jointly received the Paris Kanellakis Award for the development of a highly effective and efficient algorithm for supervised learning known as support vector machines (SVM).^[16,17] In 2023, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM Fellow) for theoretical and practical contributions to machine learning, industrial leadership, and service to the field.^[27]

Corinna Cortes has two children and is also a competitive marathon runner.^[23,2] She regularly participates in the New York Marathon and has qualified for the Boston Marathon.^[24]