Iryna Gurevych is the first female scientist from Germany and the first German university professor to receive the prestigious Milner Award from the British Royal Society. The TU Darmstadt researcher is being honored for her significant contributions to Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI, which »combine a deep understanding of human language and cognitive abilities with the latest paradigms in machine learning«, as the world's oldest independent scientific academy announced in London. Gurevych heads the Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab at the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt.

The award winner expressed her delight at the honor. »I am proud to have made a contribution with my work that is now being recognized by the Royal Society,« said Iryna Gurevych, the first German university professor to receive the Milner Award. »The award brings visibility to European Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing and is a recognition of our hard work over the years for my whole team. The Milner Award will help to attract young talent to my team, which is an important success factor in our field of science. I am honored, humbled and grateful to my team, my mentors and my colleagues.«

As a scientist, research leader, mentor and science communicator, Gurevych contributed significantly to the success of Natural Language Processing. She was one of the pioneers to use Wikipedia as a rich data source for language processing in her early work and was responsible for groundbreaking research on neural network-based text representations and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large, pre-trained transformer models such as BERT, which form the backbone of today's NLP technology.

The Milner Award is presented annually to a European researcher for outstanding achievements in computer science. The winner is selected by the Council of the Royal Society on the recommendation of the Milner Prize Committee. The committee is made up of researchers from three European countries: Members of the Royal Society, the Leopoldina (Germany) and the Académie des sciences (France). The winner will receive a medal and prize money of 5,000 pounds (about 6,000 euros) and will be invited to give a public lecture on their research at the Royal Society. The prize is awarded in honor of Professor Robin Milner (1934-2010), a pioneer of computer science.

Press Release of The Royal Society, August 28, 2024.

TU Darmstadt: »Auszeichnung für herausragende Leistungen in der Informatik«, August 28, 2024.