Marta Kwiatkowska has been awarded a five year 2.4m euro ERC Advanced Grant FUN2MODEL

Marta Kwiatkowska has been awarded a five year 2.4m euro ERC Advanced Grant FUN2MODEL: From FUNction-based TO MOdel-based automated probabilistic reasoning for DEep Learning. She is one of 222 scientists given awards in a €540 million EU investment to boost cutting-edge research.

The FUN2MODEL project aims to make advances towards provably robust 'strong' Artificial Intelligence. In contrast to 'narrow' AI perception tasks realised by deep learning, which are limited to learning data associations, and sometimes referred to as function-based, 'strong' AI aims to match human intelligence and requires model-based reasoning about causality and 'what if' scenarios, incorporation of cognitive aspects such as beliefs and goals, and probabilistic reasoning frameworks that combine logic with statistical machine learning.

The objectives of FUN2MODEL are to develop novel probabilistic verification and synthesis techniques to guarantee safety, robustness and fairness for complex decisions based on machine learning, formulate a comprehensive, compositional game-based modelling framework for reasoning about systems of autonomous agents and their interactions, and evaluate the techniques on a variety of case studies. Marta comments, ‘I am amazed by the award of the grant. It will allow me to focus on safety and robustness for AI, which are very important topics in view of the widespread deployment of such systems.’

ERC (European Research Council) Advanced Grants are highly competitive and provide long-term funding for exceptional leaders to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects. Carlos Moedas, European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, said: ‘The ERC Advanced Grants back outstanding researchers throughout Europe. Their pioneering work has the potential to make a difference in people’s everyday life and deliver solutions to some of our most urgent challenges. The ERC gives these bright minds the possibility to follow their most creative ideas and to play a decisive role in the advancement of all domains of knowledge”

FUN2MODEL is the second Advanced Grant awarded to Marta; from 2010 to 2016 she held the Advanced Grant VERIWARE (www.veriware.org).