Get to know Paul, Emilie and Fabian

PhD Student Paul Jeha 

What is your position and what will you be doing at the Pioneer Centre for AI?

I’m a PhD Student under the supervision of Jes Frellsen and Michael Riis Andersen, working on my project “Itô’s formula as a learning bridge between two SDEs”. 

What is your main research interest? 

My research interest intersects generative modelling and stochastic processes.

What are you working on at the moment, and why is it important?

Currently I am working on a score based model project, a form of diffusion model, and variance reduction. Specifically, we try to reduce the variance of the training objective to achieve faster convergence. 

What are some of the most common misconceptions about AI that you have met? 

In short, I think people misunderstands what we can currently achieve with it. It seems they think it is a drop-in replacement of any current technology that can solve pretty much anything. Even though it proposes new solutions, it also faces many new constraints and it is quite hard to have it work in practice. 

Which person in the world would you above all like to meet – dead or alive – and why? 

Maybe Cedric Villani, he has so much passion and intuition when he explains an abstract mathematical concept.  

What is your favorite thing about living in Copenhagen/Denmark?

The quality of life here is really unmatched, give me a sparkling wine during a late summer evening and I am truly the happiest man. 

PhD Fellow Anna Emilie Wedenborg 

What is your position and what will you be doing at the Pioneer Centre for AI?

I am a PhD Fellow at DTU, Cognitive Systems Section. 

What is your main research interest? 

My main research interest is to develop low-cost mathematical models which can further our understanding of massive, real-world data sets. Furthermore, I am very interested in uncertainty quantification as I find this increasingly important as we become more dependent on data science methods as a tool in decision-making. 

What are you working on at the moment, and why is it important?

I am currently working on an efficient extension of the Archetypal Analysis model, which can handle binary data. This is important as this model can be used to gain new insights into massive data sets. 

What are some of the most common misconceptions about AI that you have met? 

There seems to be a lot of trust in AI models as the end all be all solution to many of the world’s problems, regardless of whether the data, if it even exists, is suited for such approaches and with limited caution about what bias such models could inherit from the data.  

Which person in the world would you above all like to meet – dead or alive – and why? 

The non-scientific answer would definitely be J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. I am fascinated by his work with languages and history. Especially his translation of Beowulf and him as a linguistic. 

What is your favorite thing about living in Copenhagen/Denmark?

I would say the general infrastructure around the city and how you can access most areas by bike or public transport. I also really enjoy the relative smallness of the city. It is close to both the ocean and some big forests. I also think it is a relatively clean city with lots of green oasis around the different neighborhoods and a good mix of old and new architecture, which makes most areas ideal for a walk.  

PhD Student Fabian Mager

What is your position and what will you be doing at the Pioneer Centre for AI?

I am a PhD Student at the Technical University of Denmark, Section of Cognitive Systems. 

What is your main research interest? 

I am interested in AI/Machine Learning in Healthcare, specifically neuroimaging in the field of psychiatry. 

What are you working on at the moment, and why is it important?

I am working on a self-supervised transformer model of structural MRI brain images for psychiatric phenotyping. 

What are some of the most common misconceptions about AI that you have met? 

AI is not just “generative”, e.g., producing human-linke images, speech and text, but also a powerful, explainable tool that we can use to understand data. 

What is your favorite thing about living in Copenhagen/Denmark?

Copenhagen is a city on two wheels, instead of four.