Wiebke Toussaint

I am a PhD researcher in the Cyber Physical Intelligence Lab of the Engineering Systems and Services department at the Technical University of Delft. I work under the supervision of Dr. Aaron Ding and am promoted by Prof. dr. ir. Marijn Janssen. I do applied machine learning research on the trustworthy and responsible design of machine learning systems in the Internet of Things.
I view machine learning systems as powerful technology components that can enable large, engineered systems to be flexible, personalised and adaptive. As such, they must have reliable and trustworthy behaviour in complex and safety-critical applications. I seek to understand their characteristics and limitations, am interested in performance guarantees and in characterising trustworthiness aspects, such as fairness. At present I am working on model compression and domain adaptation techniques for on-device training and inference of audio and vision models. In paricular I study their application in voice assistants and occupancy monitoring systems, for applications in home, health and elderly care, gender-based violence and large scale behavioural analytics in cities.
I received my full research masters in computer science (artificial intelligence) with distinction from the University of Cape Town under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Deshen Moodley and Prof. Tommie Meyer. Outside of my academic research I am the co-founder of Engineers Without Borders South Africa, a non-profit organisation with the mission to empower engineers to empower communities. I am a fellow of TechWomen (Silicon Valley, 2018) and Data Science for Social Good (London, 2019), and am a contributor to Mozilla’s Trustworthy AI Working Group. I am always open to conversations about AI and consciousness, large scale infrastructure development and transformation.
News
Dec 7, 2020 | My first journal paper (on my masters research) is finally published! Take a look. |
Dec 3, 2020 | We’re presenting Trustworthiness Trade-offs of Edge Intelligence at CogMI 2020 today. |
Oct 21, 2020 | I’ve launched The Zen of ML as part of Mozilla’s Trustworthy AI Working Group. Contributors welcome. |
Sep 14, 2020 | On home ground, presenting our paper on clustering + electricity at SAICSIT’s annual conference. |
Aug 23, 2020 | I’m attending ACM KDD with a Student Travel Award. |
Jul 18, 2020 | Presenting key insights from our DSSG project at the ICML ML for Global Health Workshop. |
May 19, 2020 | Nice surprise! I’ve won second prize for the EdgeX Foundry IoT Innovation Challenge. |
Apr 26, 2020 | Presenting at the ICLR 2020 Machine Learning in Real Life workshop today. |