Dr Ralf Herbrich

Ralf Herbrich is Director of Microsoft's Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Lab UK which focuses on demonstrating and enabling new social experiences through development of computational intelligence technologies on large online data collections.

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.

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 makingh, computer games, kerrnel 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.