Every year, the Government of the Republic of Slovenia awards scientists for outstanding scientific achievements. This year, Nada Lavrač received the Zois award for original methods of data representation for effective machine learning. We sincerely congratulate!

Nada Lavrač, scientific councilor, former Head of the Department of Knowledge Technologies at the “Jožef Stefan” Institute, professor at the University of Nova Gorica and the Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School, is a top expert in the field of machine learning and applications of artificial intelligence in medicine and bioinformatics. Her research focuses on developing methods for learning from complex relational and heterogeneous networked data. Prof. Lavrač is the founder of the field of symbolic learning of representations, called propositionalization, which enables effective use of machine learning algorithms through automated conversion of relational data into a simpler tabular format. Her cutting-edge scientific achievements, the original machine learning methods for learning representations of complex relational data, have been presented also in a monograph “Representation Learning: Propositionalization and Embeddings”, authored by Nada Lavrač, Vid Podpečan and Marko Robnik-Šikonja, published by Springer in 2021. In addition to the original scientific contributions, the monograph presents a comprehensive overview of the research field of representation learning, achieved through a common framework and uniform terminology, enabling a unified description of representation learning techniques for the needs of classical machine learning and deep neural networks.

The award ceremony took place on December 19, 2022 in Cankarjev dom, Ljubljana. You can watch the ceremony at the link (48.50): https://www.rtvslo.si/rtv365/arhiv/P-1023323-015-0000-000?s=tv.