International award for Mara Graziani, post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Informatics

The IEEE Technical Committee on Computational Life Sciences (TCCLS) 2021 PhD Thesis Award went to Mara Graziani from the Institute of Informatics of the HES-SO Valais-Wallis for her PhD on the interpretability of Artificial Intelligence. Mara has been working in the MedGift Lab since July 2016, first as an intern, then as a PhD student and finally as a post-doc researcher. She has received many prestigious awards for her work, such as the Cambridge Engineering Department Award or the Laziodisu Award of Excellence for her Bachelor of Engineering thesis.

In her PhD, Mara focused on making the deep learning models used for medical imaging more accessible to the medical community, for example by explaining the high-level patterns that are learned by the model in terms of clinical features. This analysis can be used to improve user confidence in clinical integration and to generalise models for new patient data.

TCCLS promotes research in all aspects of computational methods and tools with applications in the life sciences, with particular emphasis on biology, medicine, and health services. The IEEE, the world's largest technical professional organisation dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity, sponsors more than 1,900 annual conferences and events worldwide, providing cutting-edge content for all technical fields.

Mara will officially receive the award at the 35th IEEE Symposium on Computer-Based Medical Systems in July. Details of her work and the award can be found on the TCCLS website.

The research results of our institute allow us to enrich the courses of our IT degree programme in Sierre and to carry out innovative and sustainable projects in the field of digitalization for local and regional SMEs. Our institute congratulates Mara for her magnificent research career and the excellence of her work.