Ortal Senouf receives an Apple scholarship

Ortal Senouf, a doctoral student at EPFL, is the first researcher at the school to receive an Apple grant for her research. After completing her studies in Israel, the scientist decided to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering at EPFL. For the past two years, she has been working on machine learning and artificial intelligence in the field of health. “In medicine, as well as in other scientific domains, we have what we call prior knowledge. This includes mathematical models that describe the behaviour or evolution of a physical or physiological system. Today, this prior knowledge is not always integrated into data-driven machine learning models and this is a real shame. Especially since it can help the model converge to better solutions," she explains. In her research, Ortal will explore the different methods and conditions for which incorporating model-based knowledge and machine learning improves their performance in prediction tasks. She hopes that this will also lead to new scientific discoveries about the behaviour of real-world physical systems, with specific applications to the cardiovascular domain and the prediction of heart attacks.

The Apple Fellowship aims to support the academic research community by highlighting emerging leaders in machine learning research. Each Fellow receives funding for their PhD, internship opportunities and mentorship with an Apple researcher. Apple Fellows in AI/ML have been selected based on their groundbreaking research, track record as thought leaders, and commitment to innovation.