Cooperating for Excellence in Research
ERCIM - the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics - aims to foster collaborative work within the European research community and to increase co-operation with European industry. Leading European research institutes are members of ERCIM.
The responsible and ethical conduct of research in science and engineering is critical for excellence, socially relevant impact and public trust. Digital and connected technologies have increasingly become intertwined with our individual and collective daily lives, mediating our communications, profiling our behaviours, changing how we think, live and act, and presenting new tensions that interrogate the applications of standard guiding ethical principles. Research in digital sciences - including computer science, automatic control, robotics and applied mathematics - raises many new ethical challenges resulting from interactions between humans and deep tech. Researchers in digital sciences face tough ethical questions in their daily activity for which there aren't yet consensual answers.
The ERCIM Selection Committee for the Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award unanimously selected Rianne de Heide, nominated by CWI, as the winner for 2023. An honorary mention is given to Denis Merigoux from Inria.
Dr. Rianne de Heide's research activity stands out for its quality and breadth. Her work covers a wide variety of topics within the general field of mathematical statistics, with focus on learning from data. In her work, Bayesian learning is used as a tool, sometimes critically evaluated, sometimes extended, always with a strong mathematical-theoretical component. Her work reaches breadth by (a) the aspects of learning from data/statistics that are studied: optional stopping, misspecification (statistics with incorrect but useful models), philosophical problems in induction, bandits, and (b) the scope across various other disciplines: philosophy and logic, psychology, and machine learning and AI.