JTS celebrates birthday with award for early-career researchers

The Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI celebrated its birthday at the House of Connections on Wednesday afternoon, 19 June 2024. The event featured the Early Career Researcher Prize awarded to five UG/UMCG researchers. In addition, interesting speeches were given on the School's namesake, Jantina Tammes, and on the evolution of 'intelligent machines'.

The birthday celebration kicked off with a lecture by Ida Stamhuis on Jantina (Tine) Tammes, the first female professor at the University of Groningen, and the second female professor in the Netherlands. Considering her non-academic background, it was anything but obvious that Tammes would make it this far, argued Stamhuis, who is working on a biography about the professor from Groningen.

During her presentation, Stamhuis also briefly addressed the connection between Jantina Tammes (the professor) and the School. According to the biographer, data-intensive activities are an important similarity between the School and scientist Jantina Tammes, who used statistics for her pioneering research in the field of genetics.

Previous winners

After the biographer's talk, three previous winners of the Early Career Researcher Prize told how the prize has 'boosted' their research. PhD student Dagmar Heeg talked about her 'travelling' artificial intelligence exhibition and assistant professor Milad Abbasiharofteh gave a talk on his research into companies in the northern Netherlands and north-western Germany that are engaged in the 'twin transition'.

Lastly, assistant professor Elisabeth Wilhelm shared her story about the Cybathlon, that is, the Olympics for athletes using robotic prosthetics. Thanks in part to the Early Career Researchers Prize, a student team from Groningen will be able to participate in the next Games in Switzerland.

Pitches

This was followed by pitches from this year's five winners. The prizes went to Esther Metting, Marília Gehrke, Evgeni Moyakine, Catherine Sibert and Matias Valdenegro. The research areas proved to be very diverse: from the acceptance of digital health to cyber-attacks, and from 'data feminism' to machine learning with Tetris, or the misconceptions about the danger of AI.

Intelligent machines

The keynote speech was by Bayu Jayawardhana, professor of Mechatronics and Nonlinear Control Systems. He gave a historical outline covering cybernetics, neural networks and artificial intelligence, and the development of 'intelligent machines'. Jayawardhana also discussed the potential of 'distributed computing', where we can learn, for instance, from octopuses, which (in effect) use the neurons in their tentacles to perform 'distributed computations'.

Award ceremony

After Jayawardhana's speech, a ceremony was held for the official awarding of the Early Career Researcher Prize, worth 2,500 euros. On top of that, the winners will receive a total of 300 hours of technical support from the Centre for Information Technology (CIT). Evgeni Moyakine and Catherine Sibert also received a bonus of 1,000 euros, to be spent on a short video to promote their topic.