ESKAS Excellence Scholarship and XAI2024 Award to Fatima Ezzeddine

For the second time, Fatima Ezzeddine has been awarded the ESKAS Excellence Scholarship, granted annually by the Swiss Confederation to promote international exchanges and research cooperation between Switzerland and over 180 countries. She was also recognized for the best PhD proposal at the World Conference on Explainable AI, the most important global event in the field.

Fatima Ezzeddine is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Information Systems and Networking (ISIN) within the Department of Innovative Technologies at SUPSI and the Faculty of Informatics at USI, under the supervision of Prof. Silvia Giordano and Omran Ayoub, Ph.D., (SUPSI), and Prof. Marc Langheinrich (USI).

In her doctoral research titled Privacy Implications of Explainable AI in Data-Driven Systems, Fatima investigates the implications of explainability in machine learning on the privacy of data and models.

More specifically, her research focuses on examining how model explanations, derived using explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) techniques, can be exploited to infer sensitive information from training data and facilitate various attacks on Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. By investigating the vulnerabilities exposed through model explanations, Fatima aims to develop strategies to mitigate these risks. Her ultimate goal is to find the right balance between understanding the ML decision-making process and preserving privacy.

"Fatima is an excellent student, and these recent recognitions add to the outstanding results she has already achieved during her thesis," comments Prof. Giordano.