Every year, G-Research runs a number of different PhD prizes in Maths and Data Science at universities in the UK, Europe and beyond.
Each prize is worth up to £10,000 and is open to final or penultimate year PhD students at specific universities, working across areas including Machine Learning, Quantitative Finance and Mathematics.
We’re pleased to announce the winners of the first prize of this year, run in conjunction with Imperial College London.
We’re proud to announce that Aras Selvi was unanimously elected as the winner of our Imperial PhD prize. Aras will receive £5,000.
Aras’ interests focus on the increasing influence artificial intelligence and machine learning-based algorithms have in decision making. He recognises that a lot of these algorithms are largely unconstrained. Constraints, however, are vital to guarantee fairness/ethics, interpretability, privacy and robustness of decisions and often make the underlying computational tasks intractable.
Therefore, in his research he formulates constrained data-driven decision making models to address various concerns and derive efficient algorithms to solve hard optimisation problems that frequently arise in such settings.
The prize money will enable Aras to attend major upcoming conferences and acquire advanced research equipment necessary for his work.
As well as awarding a first prize, we are proud to announce two runner-ups, with each receiving £2,500.
Edward is a final year PhD student in the Department of Computing at Imperial College London.
His research is on the mathematical foundations of artificial intelligence, where he focuses on developing principled methods for constructing group equivariant neural network architectures. He has developed a novel diagrammatic approach for constructing group equivariant neural networks that uses set partitions to obtain the weight matrices that appear in these networks.
Edward said: “I am honoured to receive the G-Research PhD prize, which will support me as I continue my search for a postdoctoral position.”
Sara is a final year PhD student in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London advised by Tom Coates and Alexander Kasprzyk, as part of the London School of Geometry and Number Theory.
Her doctoral research focuses on applying machine learning and data analysis methods to problems arising from pure mathematics, with the aim of helping conjecture formulation, specifically in the realm of algebraic geometry.
Sara said: “The G-Research PhD prize is a great recognition of the work I have been doing so far and I hope to use it to pay for computational resources to support my ongoing research.”
