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 Vicenç Torra
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.
What is your position/role in WASP?
WASP Professor.
Why did you choose to join WASP?
The (WASP Prof.) position is well funded and, thus, provides an opportunity to have both research time and resources to do research.
What are the benefits you see in WASP?
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.
Briefly describe your research topic.
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.
In what way can your research be of importance to our society in the future?
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.
For more information about Professor Torra, see https://www.umu.se/en/staff/vicenc-torra/
Published: August 29th, 2023