Renowned computer scientist Iryna Gurevych recently added another accolade to her impressive list: the Milner Award from the Royal Society in London, recognizing her seminal contributions to artificial intelligence and natural language processing. A member of Germany’s prestigious Leopoldina scientific society, Gurevych is a professor at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where she leads the Ubiquitous Knowledge Lab.

Her lab has become a prolific hub, producing influential academic papers, datasets, and nurturing AI talent. Among her notable doctoral students is Nils Reimers, now at Cohere, with whom she co-authored one of her most impactful works: a Transformer-based model for comparing sentence similarities.

“We are very excited about the coming years,” Gurevych shared in an interview with the European ELLIS Society, an organization promoting collaboration among AI research teams. She anticipates significant advancements in “multi-modal” models that integrate linguistic, visual, and auditory data. At the same time, she highlights the need to address critical challenges in natural language processing, such as preventing hallucinations, quantifying uncertainty, and improving model interpretability. Gurevych also raises concerns about the societal impact of emerging dialogue systems like ChatGPT, particularly their influence on the mental health of young people. She advocates for greater political commitment to addressing these issues in the near future.