We are very excited to welcome them to the program and for the chance to work with them to jointly cultivate forward-thinking research.

Charles Bergan

The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QInF) program has recognised Yarin Gal and Mark van der Wilk, graduate students in the Machine Learning Group. They have been selected for their research proposals and awarded £10,000 fellowships as well as receiving mentoring from Qualcomm researchers.

Yarin Gal, who is supervised by Professor Zoubin Ghahramani, was selected for his proposal ‘Scalable Probabilistic Representation Learning’. His work on bridging Bayesian inference and deep learning has led to the development of new tools for research in fields ranging from computational linguistics to medical diagnosis.

Mark van der Wilk, who is supervised by Professor Carl Rasmussen, has been selected for his proposal ‘Variational Inference and Kernel Bayes Rule’. He intends to develop a method which attempts to bring together desirable properties from both sampling and variational approaches to Bayesian inference.

The two students join overall Europe Champion James Booth.

“We had another exciting year for QInF Europe, with a high quality of proposals submitted,” said Charles Bergan, Vice President of Engineering at Qualcomm Research. “It was difficult to choose from such an impressive group of students, but we felt that James Booth, Yarin Gal, and Mark van der Wilk had the most innovative proposals. We are very excited to welcome them to the program and for the chance to work with them to jointly cultivate forward-thinking research.”

Luke Tunmer, Principal Engineer at Qualcomm Research Cambridge said, “We are excited to be able to offer the QInF program for a fourth year and are honoured to be able to invite PhD students from these prestigious UK Universities to submit their innovative proposals.”

The Department of Engineering would like to congratulate Yarin and Mark on their achievements.