Clare Lyle (2018, DPhil Computer Science) has been named as one of the recipients of the prestigious Open Phil AI Fellowship 2020.

The Open Phil AI Fellowship is awarding approximately $2,300,000 over five years in PhD fellowship support to 10 promising machine learning researchers around the world. Clare is the only recipient of this award who is studying at a university in the UK, one of 380 applicants for 10 places on the fellowship.

Clare is a Rhodes Scholar and the secretary of the WCR. She writes a blog about maths and computer science and regularly tweets about her work @clarelyle.

She spoke about her research in her profile, part of the celebration of 40 years of women at Univ, “Deep learning is a field of AI that allows computers to recognise faces, translate text, play games like chess, go, and Starcraft at superhuman levels, and diagnose cancer better than trained radiologists. Despite its apparent superpowers, it also fails in surprising and unpredictable ways.

“Our understanding of why deep neural networks work as well as they do, and also fail as spectacularly as they do, is still in its infancy. My research focuses on developing theoretical tools that can offer insight into these topics, and will hopefully allow us to improve the robustness and effectiveness of deep learning algorithms.”

Published: 26 May 2020

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