UCL Statistical Science lecturer receives 2019 Amazon Research Award

The 2019 awards averaged $72,000 in cash awards and $15,000 in AWS Promotional Credits in support of each research project. Each grant is intended to support the work of one to two graduate students or postdoctoral students for one year, under the supervision of a faculty member.

The 11 focus areas of this year’s research awards are computer vision; fairness in artificial intelligence; knowledge management and data quality; machine learning algorithms and theory; natural-language processing; online advertising; operations research and optimization; personalization; robotics; search and information retrieval; and security, privacy, and abuse prevention. Each project is assigned an Amazon research contact who is available for consultation and supports the project’s progress.

In Dr Briol's case, the award is in recognition of his research on Bayesian probabilistic numerical methods. The award will fund research for a project on 'Transfer Learning for Numerical Integration in Expensive Machine Learning Systems'. This project aims to significantly reduce the computational cost of machine learning systems by improving some of the numerical methods that underpin them. The project is also supported by The Alan Turing Institute, where Dr. Briol is a Group Leader in the Data-Centric Engineering prgramme, and leads the Fundamentals of Statistical Machine Learning project.

The full list of award winners can be found on the Amazon Science website. Grant proposals for the 2020 awards will be accepted from the autumn, and interested parties can email research-awards@amazon.com to be added to the 2020 Call For Proposal distribution list.

Links:

• Dr Briol's academic profile
• Department of Statistical Science
• The Alan Turing Institute
• Full award details on Amazon.Science

Image:

Composite - separate images provided by Dr Briol / Amazon Science.