University Alliance Ruhr Welcomes Mathematician for Research Professorship

Founded in 2021, the research center is currently under construction. Along with three other research centers and one college, it forms the Research Alliance Ruhr, where three partners of the UA Ruhr pool their cutting-edge research on pressing future issues. The Research Center Trustworthy Data Science and Security deals with trust in intelligent systems that support people in their decision-making processes. The aim is to make interactions between humans and machines as reliable as they are trusting and understandable. Unfortunately, current learning methods rarely acknowledge the potential errors in their predictions, pattern recognition or recommendation systems, making it often difficult for people to understand how algorithms currently work. This means that new research on quantifying uncertainties is essential to building trust. If this is to succeed in a human-centered approach, various disciplines have to collaborate – from computer science and statistics to sociology and psychology.

New perspectives on statistical learning

Among other things, Prof. Nadja Klein develops methods for not only making the analysis of huge amounts of data by intelligent systems tangible and more reliable, but also for comprehensibly assessing the quality and potential risks of results. To do this, she uses approaches from Bayesian statistics, whereby prior knowledge is incorporated into analyses, and the uncertainty of the assertions can be quantified. Although this type of statistical methods has been known for quite some time, it has only recently become drastically more relevant due to the availability of high-performance computers and is increasingly supplementing established machine learning techniques. The potential applications for this methodology are diverse, ranging from climate change and personalized medicine to autonomous driving and the optimization of logistical processes. Here, statistical methods are ultimately used to make forecasts, the quality of which is measured by how certain or uncertain it is that they will occur.

“I hope to expand the professorship into one that acts as a bridge between the Departments of Statistics, Mathematics and Computer Science as well as the empirical departments of TU Dortmund University and the UA Ruhr. In doing so, I aim to create synergies with my strong international network of experts in the relevant areas,” says Prof. Nadja Klein. She plans to focus on interdisciplinary research projects at the interface between statistical and machine learning, and on the quantification of uncertainty and various applications. “With Prof. Klein, TU Dortmund University has gained a renowned and internationally well-connected expert, who has already received numerous awards. Her work in the fields of distributional regression and Bayesian learning methods is cutting-edge for data science and, as such, can be found in the world's leading journals,” says Prof. Philipp Doebler, Dean of the Department of Statistics. “The question of how certain or uncertain something is, is a fundamental factor for trust between people – the same is true for future human-machine interactions,” says Prof. Emmanuel Müller, the founding director of the research center. “That’s why this new professorship is an important part of our research.”

Prof. Nadja Klein obtained her doctorate in mathematics from the University of Göttingen in 2015. She then obtained two years researching Bayesian statistical learning methods at the University of Melbourne, Australia, as a Humboldt Research Fellow. As a junior professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, she was granted with funding for an Emmy Noether Group from the German Research Foundation in 2019 and was accepted into the Junge Akademie in 2020, where she heads the “Artificial Intelligence” research group. From 2021, she was W3 professor for “Statistics and Data Science" at Humboldt-Universität before finally moving to TU Dortmund University.

Research Alliance Ruhr

The Research Alliance Ruhr was initiated as part of the Ruhr Conference of the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia to expand the top-level international research of TU Dortmund University, Ruhr-Universität Bochum and the University of Duisburg-Essen, all of which cooperate in the UA Ruhr. Founded in 2021, the Research Alliance is made up of four interuniversity Research Centers: “One Health Ruhr”, “Chemical Sciences and Sustainability”, “Trustworthy Data Science and Security” and “Future Energy Materials and Systems”. On top of that, a “College for Social Sciences and Humanities” was also established. The state government of North Rhine-Westphalia has committed to support the development phase until 2025 with 123 million euros in funding.

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