Vicenç Torra is a WASP Professor at the Department of Computing Science at Umeå University. Professor Torra was recruited by WASP as a Wallenberg Chair in AI in 2020.
WASP Professor.
The (WASP Prof.) position is well funded and, thus, provides an opportunity to have both research time and resources to do research.
On the one hand, the network of researchers at different levels of their career. I think that this is good for all of us, but specially for younger researchers and PhD students. On the other, the possibility of getting funded for AI-related projects.
Data privacy for machine and statistical learning. That is, how data can be protected so that it can be shared with low disclosure risk, and how models can be built from data so that these models are privacy preserving. I also do research on approximate reasoning and uncertainty for AI. I am interested in the mathematical foundations of tools to deal with uncertainty and decision making. For example, fuzzy sets and non-additive measures. They permit to solve/represent problems that cannot so easily be solved/represented with other tools.
The importance of good data is well known, and their usage is increasing every year, and is expected to increase even more. Data sharing can lead to disclosure of sensitive information. This can cause harm. Data-driven models built from sensitive data can also disclosure sensitive information inadvertently. Privacy-aware technologies are to avoid this unintended disclosure.