Robert Elias Schapire was the David M. Siegel '83 Professor in the computer science department at Princeton University and recently moved to Microsoft Research. His primary specialty is theoretical and applied machine learning.
His work led to the development of the boosting ensemble algorithm used in machine learning. Together with Yoav Freund, he invented the AdaBoost algorithm in 1996. He received the Gödel prize in 2003 for his work on AdaBoost with Yoav Freund.
In 2014, Schapire was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for his contributions to machine learning through the invention and development of boosting algorithms.