From Lebanon to Ticino: the story of Fatima Ezzeddine, PhD candidate at the Faculty of Informatics

From Lebanon to Ticino: the story of Fatima Ezzeddine, PhD candidate at the Faculty of Informatics

Fatima Ezzeddine is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Informatics at Università della Svizzera italiana (USI) who moved to Ticino from Lebanon to study how reliable the decisions made by complex algorithms are. The young researcher told her story in an interview conducted by Ticino Scienza.

Fatima Ezzeddine ’s work is supervised by Prof. Marc Langheinrich , Full Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Informatics at USI, as well as by several professors from SUPSI (Prof. Silvia Giordano and Omran Ayoub), who have expressed words of appreciation for the doctoral candidate, who has already received numerous awards. She has twice received the ESKAS Excellence Scholarship for research in Switzerland (awarded by the Confederation to foreign researchers) and was also awarded the prize for the best doctoral proposal at the World Conference on Explainable AI , the most important international event in the field.

Fatima Ezzeddine’s studies focus on two main aspects. On the one hand, the decision-making process behind Machine Learning, i.e. algorithms and models that allow computers to improve their performance over time by learning data, and on the other hand, the protection of privacy, which is linked to a crucial issue for the young researcher: "Artificial intelligence (AI) systems carry with them the risk of perpetuating or amplifying social stereotypes due to distorted training data". Indeed, the world of the web represents a fertile ground for the spread of fake news, "often manipulated by so-called trolls, users who participate in discussions on digital platforms with the deliberate intent to provoke, disrupt or create conflict and misinformation, with inferences even in our privacy," Ezzeddine explained. The journey that brought the young USI doctoral candidate to Lugano began with a The This endeavour started when she was still in Lebanon.

Fatima Ezzeddine’s current study is. "My thesis focuses on Explainable AI, a methodology designed to address the perception of artificial intelligence as a black box. The goal is to enhance the performance of algorithms while ensuring that their decisions are transparent and understandable. This is a crucial step towards building trust in AI and fostering a more democratic use of this technology in society. All this led me to delve into the privacy aspects, especially when it is stated that providing too much information in the field of explicable AI can be problematic because, for instance, it reveals details about personal data. This reflection led me to focus on the social dimension of AI and how this affects human rights. I believe it is essential to strike a balance between transparency and data protection".

The full interview with Fatima Ezzeddine, edited by Valeria Camia for Ticino Scienza, is available at the following.