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G-Research February 2024 Grant Winners

29 February 2024
  • News

Each month, we provide up to £2,000 in grant money to early career researchers in quantitative disciplines.

Our aim is to support and assist PhD students and postdocs conducting research, particularly with costs that may be difficult to get funding for elsewhere, for example, travel for those who are caring for children, or expenses for volunteer work related to research.

Learn more about our grant programme, including how you can apply and the work we support.

Read on to hear from our latest winners, their research and how our grants will aid their work.

February grant winners

Giovanni Sartori (Heriot-Watt University)

“I am a PhD student in Mathematics, with strong focus on the interactions between Algebra and Geometry. More precisely, in my research field I exploit geometrical methods to visualise and better understand Artin groups, a wide family of – still mysterious – algebraic objects, which encode symmetries of our space.

“I would like to thank G-Research for supporting my participation in ‘Young Geometric Group Theory’, the most valuable conference in my research field for early career researchers and the main opportunity throughout the year to discover state-of-the-art research and start collaborations.”

Elliot Young (University of Cambridge)

“I am a final year PhD student in the Statistics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, researching modern statistical methodology, often utilising machine learning methods to answer statistical questions in a robust and valid manner.

“My most recent work addresses certain problems that can arise when attempting to achieve efficiency in semiparametric inference problems, specifically how using pre-existing machine learning methods in these frameworks can cause a breakdown in robustness and severely bias results. This analysis consequently motivates a new machine learning methodology to resolve these issues, providing practical methods for improved semiparametric estimation.

“This generous grant from G-Research will allow me to undertake a research visit to ETH Zurich, where I will be able to present and extend this current research further.”

Costas Smaragdakis (University of the Aegean)

“I just started as an Assistant Professor at the Department of Statistics and Actuarial-Financial Mathematics at the University of the Aegean.

“My current research focuses on the numerical solution of partial integral differential equations (PIDE) in high dimensions by developing advanced machine learning methods.

“This grant from G-Research supports my transition from a postdoctoral researcher to a faculty member and enables me to jointly organize a mini-symposium at the International Conference on Computational Finance (ICCF24).”

Vincent Adam (University Pompeu Fabra)

“I am a postdoctoral researcher in Machine Learning. One of my research interests is to develop general and practical algorithms for approximate Bayesian inference in probabilistic models. The aim is to strike a good trade-off between speed (computational cost) and accuracy of the approximation.

“In my latest publication, I tackle the problem of learning the parameters of stochastic dynamical systems from noisy observations, with applications to system identification and time-series analysis.

“This grant will give me the opportunity to present this work at the conference AISTATS.

Irina Pi Jaumà (University of Barcelona)

“I am in the last year of my PhD in Physics at the University of Barcelona, working to unveil the inner mechanisms and general principles behind biological complexity.

“I apply concepts and tools from statistical physics and active matter to model living systems and explain physical phenomena relevant to biology. For instance, I study how the mechanical cues and hydrodynamic interactions influence the directed migration in cells and tissues. My focus is on epithelial tissues, both for their roles in many biological functions but also for their simplicity and robust shape, which makes them good target systems for phenomenological modelling.

“The generous funding from G-Research will allow me to do a research stay in the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS) and the Center of Systems Biology (CBSD), both in Dresden (Germany), to broaden the scope of my work and benefit from a fruitful collaboration in two outstanding centres for the biophysics community.”

Irene Cannistraci (Sapienza University of Rome)

“I am a PhD student in Computer Science working on Representaion Learning.

“My recent research involves studying and analyzing how and why independent neural networks encode information similarly. This investigation enables the adaptation and re-utilization of neural models, bypassing the demand for extensive retraining resources. It supports the exchange of knowledge between these models and offers the capability to directly evaluate their performance within the latent space.

“This grant from G-Research will support me during my visiting period at the Helmholtz Institute of AI for Health (Helmholtz Munich), where I will work at the intersection of my research with topological machine learning and biology!”

Congratulations to our grant winners.

Learn more about our monthly grant and how you can apply.

Hear from one of our previous winners

Neuros as one of the biggest and most renowned conferences is of course a great place, uh, to meet researchers, to, uh, network with companies and also to attend the talks and get to know the newest strengths, basically in ml. But for me personally, one main motivation is also paper, which I submitted and where I will be having an oral at, uh, a score based workshop on Friday. And I'm very excited about this research. So I am very excited about the, the workshops because you have like the basically sub communities focusing on specific topics and, uh, you get to know a lot of, uh, interesting researchers. You start collaborations. But I'm also very interested on attending the poster sessions because you get to speak to, uh, people directly to the authors of papers. Basically directly. I would've not been able to attend NIPS without the grant from G Research. So I'm very grateful to g Research for making this happen. And this helps me to present my research here, talk to people, and hopefully start new collaborations, um, which evolve from my previous research. Well, I've spoken to a couple of people from GE research at previous conferences, and I've also been, um, contacted by the recruitment team. Um, I'm already start, I already started the interviewing process. It's a very exciting journey. Um, and I think that they are problem, which they tackle, like predicting the future of the world and the financial markets is very interesting and I think or appreciate their approach of using recent technology in ML to tackle this problem.
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