Meet Vera Koponen, a WASP affiliated Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at Uppsala University, who unifies logic and statistics in AI. Dr Koponen joined WASP in 2019.
I am a teacher in two WASP courses and supervisor of a PhD student funded by WASP.
In 2019 (or slightly earlier) I was asked by colleagues to teach a module in a course within WASP Graduate School and I accepted.
The possibility of getting funding for research that I find interesting, and which combines my previous experience of research in mathematical logic with research problems in AI. Other benefits are the contact with other researchers in AI and related areas.
My research contributes to the unification of two important schools within AI, the logical school and the statistical school. It aims at laying firm mathematical foundations for methodologies for learning and prediction that combine the expressive power of formal logic with statistical methods. See for example my article Conditional probability logic, lifted Bayesian networks, and almost sure quantifier elimination.
I hope that my research will contribute to the understanding of various aspects of learning and inference in AI, for example the aspect of scalability of relational learning to large domains. This would improve the practical possibilities of finding patterns in huge quantities of relational data, and this can be beneficial in various contexts.
