Mark Kon

Mark Kon is a professor of Mathematics and Statistics. He is affiliated with the Bioinformatics Program and the Program in Cognitive and Neural Systems.

He received a PhD in Mathematics from MIT, and Bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology from Cornell University. He has had appointments at Columbia University as Assistant and Associate Professor (Computer Science, Mathematics), at Tufts University as Assistant Professor, and at MIT as a graduate instructor. He has served as departmental director of graduate studies at Boston University, and he is currently affiliated with the Bioinformatics Graduate Program. He has published approximately 100 articles in mathematics and statistics, computational biology, neural network theory, and mathematical physics, including one book. His recent research and applications interests involve machine learning, computational biology, statistics and probability, neural networks, and complexity. His recent work in machine learning has investigated complexities of designs for learning machines and neural networks which improve, sometimes significantly, on those for standard architectures. Application areas include bioinformatics and genetic transcription informatics. He is on the editorial board of Neural Networks, and has been on the organizing committee of the World Congress on Neural Networks twice. He has had recent research grants and contracts from the American Fulbright Commission, National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Air Force. He has given approximately 100 lectures in 15 countries. Among organizational roles, he has been a co-organizer for MIT summer analysis seminars in Vermont, and the organizer of a mini-symposium on Computational Complexity Theory in Chamonix, France.