The Vatat Scholarship was granted for the third time by the Israeli council for higher education, to ten PhD students from all Israeli academic institutions.
Among the winners this year is Idan Attias, a PhD student in BGU's department of Computer Science, who is the only winner from BGU, out of 5 candidates submitted to Vatat.
Idan is conducting his research under the supervision of Prof. Aryeh Kontorovich (Ben-Gurion University) and Prof. Yishay Mansour (Tel-Aviv University). His primary research interests are the statistical and computational aspects of theoretical machine learning, as well as its intersection with related fields, such as optimization, game theory, and private data analysis.
Currently, he is focused on the foundations of robust machine learning. This area of growing importance deals with the ways to build trustworthy machine learning systems and mitigate vulnerabilities of learning-based algorithms. For Example, thwarting malicious perturbations of training and test examples.
Way to go, Idan!