ART-AI are launching a new ‘ART-AI Spotlight on Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity series’. The aim of these talks, which will happen 3-4 times a year, are to raise awareness about Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity issues within our sector.
We are excited to have Maria Skoularidou join us for our first one of these talks. Maria is a PhD Student at the University of Cambridge and also {Dis}Ability in AI Chair;
Maria will provide an overview of disability in the AI workplace covering topics like what do people with disabilities have to deal with, how inclusive are companies and where are they lacking, and how to be successful in the field as a person with a disability/what can other people do to be more inclusive. This event will be chaired by student Mafalda Ribeiro. If you would like to join this talk, please e-mail [email protected]
Bio
Maria holds a 4-year diploma in Computer Science and 2-year Master of Science in Statistical Science both from Athens University of Economics and Business and is currently a final year PhD student at the University of Cambridge, MRC-Biostatistics Unit supervised by Professor Sylvia Richardson. Her thesis is focused on probabilistic machine learning and, more precisely, towards using generative modelling in healthcare.
Since the spring semester of 2020 Maria has also been a visiting researcher at Professor Costis Daskalakis’ group at CSAIL, MIT after being granted the 2020 Trinity College, University of Cambridge award in Mathematics.
Prior to pursuing a PhD, Maria was a research associate (2014-2016) at two EU funded research projects at Athens University of Economics and Business and Technical University of Crete. The aim of her research during these projects, was causal inference through the lens of Information Theory and Bayesian theory and methodology with application to economics and computational biology.
The focus of Maria’s MSc thesis was on “Context Tree Weighting for Signal Processing, Bayesian Inference and Model Selection: Theory and Algorithms”, a topic that lies at the intersection of Information theory and Bayesian statistics, under the insightful supervision of Professor Petros Dellaportas.
Contribution to society:
- Founder and chair of {Dis}Ability in AI and founder and secretary of Women in Data Science and Statistics (RSS special interest group)
- Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility Chair of NeurIPS (2021)
- Social Chair of NeurIPS (2019-2020)
- Reviewer at:
Journal I.E.E.E. Transactions On Information Theory (2016-present), Journal I.E.E.E. Transactions On Signal Processing (2018-present), Entropy (2020-present), Workshop of Women in Machine Learning (2018-present), I.E.E.E. International Symposium on Information Theory (2019-present), International Conference on Machine Learning (2020-present), Neural Information Processing Systems (2020) - Originator and organiser of several workshops in my field (eg “ Advances and Challenges in Machine Learning Languages“)
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