Prof. Dr. Jana de Wiljes has headed the new Mathematics of Data Science Group at the Department of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at TU Ilmenau since October 2023. Her academic career began with a doctorate in the field of machine learning at the specialized area of mathematics at Freie Universität Berlin. For her dissertation on data-driven discrete spatiotemporal models, she was awarded the Tiburtius Prize for doctoral students at Berlin universities for outstanding dissertations. Since June 2017, she has been Principal Investigator of various projects on data assimilation within a Collaborative Research Center funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In June 2022, Prof. de Wiljes was awarded the title of Dosentti (lecturer) in mathematics in the field of machine learning - comparable to a German habilitation - by the Department of Engineering at Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology in Finland.
Prof. de Wiljes' research work focuses primarily on sequential learning - a method that makes it possible to make reliable predictions even with little data. This includes the theoretical investigation and uncertainty quantification of existing techniques, the development of new and advanced algorithms for Bayesian inference, and the application of state-of-the-art methods to real-world data in areas such as climate and space weather modeling. In particular, she develops methods for high-dimensional, nonlinear and nonstationary inverse problems and analyzes them for stability and accuracy. In addition, she deals with supervised and unsupervised machine learning and reinforcement learning, especially in connection with the optimization of therapies and the identification of causal links in medicine. In addition to her professorship at TU Ilmenau, Prof. de Wiljes also holds a visiting professorship at the Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology.