Prof. Gurevych is considered a pioneer in NLP research, a field of artificial intelligence (AI) that includes large language models (LLMs) such as the chatbot ChatGPT. In her early work, she used Wikipedia as a rich data source for language processing and was responsible for groundbreaking research on neural network-based text representations and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large, pre-trained transformer models such as BERT, which form the backbone of today's NLP technology.

The Milner Award the memory of Professor Robin Milner (1934-2010), a pioneer in computer science. It is awarded annually to a European researcher for outstanding achievements in computer science. The winner is selected by the Council of the Royal Society based on the recommendations of the Milner Prize Committee. This committee is made up of researchers from three European countries: Members of the Royal Society, the Leopoldina (Germany) and the Académie des sciences (France). The winner receives a medal and prize money of 5.000 £ (just under 6.000 €) and is invited to give a public lecture on their research at the Royal Society.

Prof. Iryna Gurevych heads the ‘Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing’ research area at the Department of Computer Science at TU Darmstadt. In 2021, she was the first woman to be awarded a LOEWE top professorship. She contributes her research in automatic language processing and artificial intelligence to the ATHENE research areas Automatic Vulnerability Scanning and Verification (AVSV), Security and Privacy in Artificial Intelligence (SENPAI) and Secure Digital Transformation in Health Care (SeDiTraH), among others.

More about the award