Paula Gordaliza Pastor, winner of one of the Vicent Caselles Mathematical Research Awards
The Spanish Royal Mathematical Society and the BBVA Foundation award these prizes with the aim of supporting and stimulating young professionals working in the field of mathematical research.
Paula Gordaliza Pastor did her undergraduate, master’s and doctoral studies at the University of Valladolid. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Centre for Applied Mathematics – BCAM.
The researcher from Valladolid works in the area of Data Science and, according to the jury, “the research in her thesis concerns the interface between Mathematical Statistics, Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, mainly focused on equity in prediction/classification of machine learning models”.
Six young researchers have been awarded the Vicent Caselles Mathematical Research Prize, which has been awarded by the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society and the BBVA Foundation since 2015. This award recognises creativity, originality and achievement in the field of mathematics research in the early years of the scientific profession.
Among the award winners is Paula Gordaliza Pastor from Valladolid, postdoctoral researcher at the Basque Centre for Applied Mathematics – BCAM and associate professor at the Public University of Navarra. Gordaliza Pastor works in the area of Data Science, in mathematical research with applications in the field of Fair and Trustworthy Machine Learning.
The jury of the awards highlighted the objective of the BCAM researcher’s thesis, which focuses on correcting the biases that exist in artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. “My research allowed me to develop a methodology for repairing a dataset biased by the influence of a sensitive variable (e.g. race, gender, age, etc.) based on optimal transport theory”. This repair procedure allows, broadly speaking, to control the level of transformation of the original data in order to establish a balance between fairness and accuracy of the classification algorithm, subsequently trained with them.
The researcher from the Machine Learning research line and associate professor at the Public University of Navarra, says that “you never expect to receive this type of recognition, as these are high-level and very competitive calls” and stresses that “when you receive recognition, it is a great joy and a boost to keep working and striving every day”.
