ECE Faculty awarded funding for Trustworthy ML research from UBC VPRI’s Research Excellence Clusters initiative

ECE professor Julia Rubin, together with her colleagues, professors Karthik Pattabiraman and Ali Mesbah, leads the “Trustworthiness of Machine-Learning-Based Systems (TrustML)” research cluster, which has been awarded funding through the 2022/2023 UBC Research Excellence Clusters initiative.

Research excellence clusters are inter-departmental networks of researchers who collectively represent leaders in a particular field of study. They are founded to foster partnerships and collaborations across disciplines, and to create and develop new research through interdisciplinary teamwork.

The goal of TrustML is to facilitate the development of trustworthy machine-learning-based systems- i.e., systems that are reliable, secure, explainable, and ethical. The cluster includes members from six different faculties at UBC, the industry, and the BC government. They will examine trust-related requirements in several life-critical domains, including medicine, manufacturing, urban planning, and aerospace, and will investigate solutions for building trustworthy systems that professionals and the general public can reliably adopt. 

The work of the cluster is aligned with Dr. Rubin’s own research, which focuses on software quality and on robustness, explainability, and fairness of ML-based systems. Dr. Rubin is a Canada Research Chair, Tier II, in Trustworty Software. Before joining UBC, she spent almost 10 years in industry, working for IBM Research, where she was a Research Staff Member and a Research Group Manager.

Learn more about the 2022/23 projects funded through Grants for Catalyzing Research Clusters (GCRC).