Reliable answers to causal questions: funding for fundamental research
Jesse Krijthe, Aad van der Vaart and their “Safe Causal Inference” consortium receive Open Competition ENW-XL funding
Providing reliable answers to causal questions is what the consortium project of Jesse Krijthe, assistant professor within the Pattern Recognition & Bioinformatics group, Aad van der Vaart, statistics professor at the Delft Institute of Applied Mathematics, and colleagues from Leiden, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, is all about. The consortium called ‘Safe Causal Inference’, will conduct groundbreaking research and develop new scientific insights and methods to combine expert knowledge and data-driven methods. This will lead to methods to provide reliable answers to causal questions. To achieve a breakthrough within this research, the consortium has received the Open Competition ENW-XL grant from NWO and has been awarded 2.5 million euros.
Learning about cause and effect
Learning about cause and effect is at the heart of science. Some scientific disciplines use experiments for this purpose, but many important societal questions can only be answered by collecting data from everyday practice. Applying artificial intelligence to learn from this type of data is promising, but can lead to unsubstantiated, incorrect and potentially harmful conclusions and decisions. In this consortium Jesse Krijthe, Nan van Geloven (LUMC), Jeremy Labrecque (EMC), Stéphanie van der Pas (Amsterdam UMC) and Aad van der Vaart, will develop new scientific insights and methods to combine expert knowledge and data-driven methods, reducing and quantifying the remaining uncertainty. This will lead to methods to provide reliable answers to causal questions.
EEMCS researchers
As an assistant professor in the Pattern Recognition & Bioinformatics group of TU Delft (Delft University of Technology) Jesse Krijthe works on methodology and applications of statistical machine learning. His research is concerned with machine learning, causal inference, and statistical methods to use data for reliable decision support.
Dr. Aad van der Vaart is professor of statistics at the Institute of Applied Mathematics of TU Delft. His research has focused on a wide range of topics in statistics and its applications (in e.g. genomics, imaging, finance), with an emphasis on asymptotic methods, infinite- and high-dimensional models and nonparametric Bayesian statistics. Causality is currently a main topic for both his research and teaching.
Open Competition ENW-XL funding
Thanks to the Open Competition ENW-XL funding from NWO research consortia have the opportunity to make a breakthrough within the exact and natural sciences. All funded research has an essential goal: to take a big step in curiosity-driven basic science research by consortia. A total of €64 million has been allocated, with one to three million allocated to each project.