Damien Teney receives an Amazon Research Award

The last cycle of Amazon Research Awards announced 26 awards recipients. Among them, Damien Teney was selected for his project to improve machine learning models.

Head of the Machine Learning group at Idiap, Damien Teney submitted to Amazon Research Awards a proposal under the title "Addressing Underspecification for Improved Fairness and Robustness in Conversational AI". The aim of this project is to improve robustness and fairness of machine learning models. These challenging aspects are particularly relevant to question-answering and dialogue systems, which are increasingly widespread.

“The seeming omniscience of some recent machine learning models is counterbalanced by a complete lack of reliability. This is a major drawback for most commercial and industrial applications, which need instead reliable and/or transparent solutions that address relatively constrained tasks”, Teney explains.

An award with benefits

Announced on January 30th 2023, the 26 award recipients represent 24 universities and research organizations from seven countries. Teney was selected among many competitive  proposals from across the world. Recipients of the awards are granted funds to conduct their research, in addition to an access to Amazon Web Services AI/ML platform, tools, and datasets.

More information

- Amazon Research Awards announcement