Computing Student wins Sciences Postgraduate Research Prize

Computer Science PhD student, Farhana Liza, has been selected as the Sciences Postgraduate Research Prize Winner for 2018. Farhana has won £500, which can be used for costs related to her research. The prize was presented formally at the Postgraduate Festival on the afternoon of Monday 18th June, followed by a dinner in Canterbury for the prize-winners.

Farhana's research is in the field of Artificial Intelligence, specifically in the intersection between deep learning (with Artificial Neural Networks) and the natural language processing, and is supervised by Marek Grzes and Professor Alex Freitas.

Language models estimate the probability of an upcoming word for a given context, i.e., for a given, partially specified sentence. The benefit of such models can be seen on smart phones that show the most likely words that the user is typing in the predictive mode.

In her PhD project, Farhana is investigating the novel approaches that improve language modelling by incorporating larger context and by using hierarchical structures in natural language efficiently with sampling mechanisms. She is also attempting to contribute to the understanding of those methods.

Farhana said 'I am extremely happy and motivated by winning this prize. It is deeply satisfying to win a prize, especially at third year of PhD study when students (including me) are usually super stressed with the research project and with the future plans.'

Farhana, who is originally from Bangladesh, is currently undertaking a prestigious three-month internship at the Alan Turing Institute.

Our congratulations go to Farhana.