UBC's Schmidt wins ECML PKDD Test of Time Award for 2016 gradient convergence paper cited 2,000+ times
MarkSchmidtUBC · x · 2026-09-29
UBC professor Mark Schmidt and former trainees Hamed Karimi and Julie Nutini received the Test of Time Award at ECML PKDD 2026 in Naples for their 2016 paper establishing a framework for proving fast convergence of gradient methods.
- Cited over 2,000 times in the past decade
- Used to re-derive convergence guarantees for nearly every standard optimization method, with extensions to reinforcement learning and diffusion model sampling
- Karimi, now a senior applied scientist at Amazon, said they never expected the paper to make a splash
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