WASP is very proud to have so many excellent researchers involved in the program. More than 450 researchers, reaching from assistant to senior professors, are affiliated with WASP. Some are international recruitments who have come to Sweden to join the WASP community, others are already well established in the Swedish academic system.
Through a series of portraits, you get the opportunity to get to know them a little bit better.
Meet Vera Koponen
Vera Koponen is a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor at the Department of Mathematics at Uppsala University. Dr Koponen joined WASP in 2019.
What is your position/role in WASP?
I am a teacher in two WASP courses and supervisor of a PhD student funded by WASP.
Why did you choose to join 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.
What are the benefits you see in WASP?
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.
Briefly describe your research topic.
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.
In what way can your research be of importance to our society in the future?
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.
For more information about Dr Koponen, see https://katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N96-558
Published: August 31st, 2022