Isabel Valera Martinez

Isabel Valera Martínez is a full Professor of Machine Learning at the Department of Computer Science, Saarland University, and an Adjunct Faculty at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (MPI-SWS). She holds a PhD in Machine Learning from the University Carlos III of Madrid and has held prestigious fellowships including the Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Minerva Fast Track Fellowship from the Max Planck Society. Her research focuses on developing interpretable, robust, and fair machine learning methods, with applications in healthcare, social systems, and consequential decision-making like hiring and loan approvals.

Education: PhD in Machine Learning (2014) and MSc in Multimedia and Communications (2012) from University Carlos III of Madrid; Master’s work at Leibniz University Hannover (2009); Telecommunications Engineering from the Technical University of Cartagena (2009).

Research Interests: Fairness in AI, Bayesian nonparametric models, robust machine learning, and applications in healthcare and social systems. She co-leads the ELLIS Robust Machine Learning program and the Saarbrücken AI & Machine Learning (SAM) Unit.

Key Publications: Contributions to fair classification frameworks, automatic discovery of data types, and modeling psychiatric comorbidity. Notable venues include AAAI, NIPS/NeurIPS, JMLR, and ICML.

Awards: Humboldt Fellowship, Minerva Fellowship, Best Paper Honorable Mention at WWW 2017.

Labs & Collaborations: Active in the ELLIS Society and MPI-SWS, focusing on interdisciplinary AI applications.