Ralf Herbrich is heading the Bing Personalization team which focuses on prototyping and enabling personalized experiences across Microsoft's Online Services Division, including Bing Mobile, Bing News, Bing Web and AdCenter, through agile development and fast deployment of computational intelligence and social computing technologies.
Ralf joined Microsoft Research in 2000 as a Postdoctoral researcher and Research Fellow of the Darwin College Cambridge. From 2006 - 2008, together with Thore Graepel, he was leading the Applied Games group which engaged in research at the intersection of machine learning and computer games.
Two years later, both of them widened the research focus of this team and established the Online Services and Advertising (OSA) research group. The OSA group conducts research in the areas of online services, search and online advertising combining insights from machine learning, information retrieval, game theory, artificial intelligence and social network analysis.
From 2009 to 2011, Ralf was Director of Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab UK demonstrating and enabling new social experiences through development of computational intelligence technologies on large online data collections.
Prior to joining Microsoft, Ralf worked at the Technical University Berlin as a teaching assistant where he obtained both a diploma degree in Computer Science and a Ph.D. degree in Statistics.
Ralf's research interests include Bayesian inference and decision making, computer games, kernel methods and statistical learning theory.
Ralf is 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. More recently, he co-invented the click-prediction technology used in Bing's online advertising system.
- Weiwei Cheng, Gjergji Kasneci, Thore Graepel, David Stern, and Ralf Herbrich, Automated Feature Generation from Structured Knowledge, in the 20th ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM 2011), ACM, 2011
- Yan Xu, Xian Cao, Abigail Sellen, Ralf Herbrich, and Thore Graepel, Sociable killers: understanding social relationships in an online first-person shooter game, in CSCW '11 Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work , ACM, 2011
- Ulrich Paquet, Jurgen Van Gael, David Stern, Gjergji Kasneci, Ralf Herbrich, and Thore Graepel, Vuvuzelas & Active Learning for Online Classification, in Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds Workshop (colocated with NIPS 2010), December 2010
- Tauhid R. Zaman, Ralf Herbrich, Jurgen Van Gael, and David Stern, Predicting Information Spreading in Twitter, in Computational Social Science and the Wisdom of Crowds Workshop (colocated with NIPS 2010), December 2010
- David Stern, Ralf Herbrich, Thore Graepel, Horst Samulowitz, Luca Pulina, and Armando Tacchella, Collaborative Expert Portfolio Management, in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence AAAI-10 (to appear), July 2010
