In the Spotlight: Anastasia Borovykh

As part of our Women in AI IN THE SPOTLIGHT series we had the pleasure to talk to Anastasia Borovykh .

Anastasia is an assistant professor in machine learning at 英国帝国理工学院 & a co-founder of SkiaLabs , a Dutch startup that builds software for waste management using AI & optimisation.

How does your work make an impact on AI and the world?

In the last years I have been working on explainable and robust AI which given the ever-increasing number of usecases of ML becomes more & more important. Next to that I am particularly interested in applications of ML to neuroscience as I have always been curious about how the brain works. There is also an interesting two-way street: leveraging insights from neuroscience to inspire new ML algo's and applying ML algo's to understand brain data.

Next to that together with a colleague we founded Skialabs, a startup that builds AI-based software for waste collection; our software is used by e.g. the city of Amsterdam to collect waste.

What would you say to your younger self or other young women to encourage them to pursuit a career in AI?

To myself I would say stick to things a bit longer: don't jump from one hype to the other, but take the time to really properly dive into a problem you find interesting - if you find it interesting & do good research on this problem, then most likely others will find your work interesting too.

What are the three core competencies (skills) that others should focus on, to be successful in your field?

Maths and statistics are very important & of course coding.

Do you have any tips and tricks on how to develop more in-depth AI knowledge?

I would dive deeper into mathematics and statistics as these are necessary areas to properly grasp AI.

Curious to know more? Check her publications here or contact her via LinkedIn.