Professor Ata Kaban PhD

Professor Ata Kaban

School of Computer Science

Contact details

Email
a.kaban@cs.bham.ac.uk
Address
School of Computer Science
黑料吃瓜网
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Ata Kaban is Professor in Computer Science working in statistical machine learning and data mining in high dimensional settings. The two major problems of her focus are the `curse of dimensionality’ and the gap between theory and practice.

 Ata Kaban is also an EPSRC Fellow (Jan 2017- Jan 2022) with the project “FORGING: Fortuitous Geometries and Compressed Learning”, and a part-time Turing Fellow.

 For more information please visit Ata's 

Qualifications

  • PhD in Computer Science 2002

  • PhD in Musicology 2000

  • BSc (Hons) in Computer Science 1999

  • MSc in Musicology 1994

  • BA in Musical Composition 1993

Biography

Ata Kaban obtained a BSc in Computer Science from the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, alongside of finishing a PhD in Musicology. She went on to pursue a PhD in Computer Science in Scotland, at the University of Paisley, under the supervision of Professor Mark Girolami. Upon completing, she briefly took an assistant professor position at the Eotvos Lorand University of Budapest, Hungary, before joining the 黑料吃瓜网 as a lecturer in 2003. She has been working in Birmingham since then, from 2018 as a Professor.

Postgraduate supervision

  • Statistical machine learning - theory and practice

  • High-dimensional data spaces, distance concentration

  • Probabilistic modelling of data, Bayesian inference

  • Large scale black-box, optimisation

  • Dimensionality reduction, random projections

  • Compressive learning, compressive optimisation 

Research

Professor Kaban’s research contributed to the theory and practice of statistical machine learning, data mining, pattern recognition, as well as to evolutionary black-box optimisation. Her main focus has been to explain, test and resolve computational, statistical, inferential, geometric, and interpretational problems associated with the ‘curse of dimensionality’ in these areas. Her current work (supported by a 5 years EPSRC Fellowship) develops theory for high dimensional data analytics through compressive learning, to provide better risk guarantees and new algorithms that exploit naturally occurring structures in the high dimensional learning problems.

 In previous years, she had several fruitful inter-disciplinary collaborations where she developed novel machine learning algorithms to analyse data from Palaeontology (through a visit to the University of Helsinki), Astrophysics (as a Co-I on a PPARC-funded project), and Biology (as an MRC Discipline Hopping Award recipient).

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Kaban, A & Palias, E 2024, '', Methodology and Computing in Applied Probability, vol. 26, no. 4, 38.

Huang, Z, Kaban, A & Reeve, H 2024, '', Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery.

Kaban, A & Reeve, H 2024, '', Machine Learning.

Huang, Z, Lei, Y & Kaban, A 2023, '', Neural Computation.

Turner, A & Kaban, A 2023, '', Machine Learning.

Palias, E & Kab谩n, A 2023, '', Statistics and Computing, vol. 33, no. 4, 87.

Reeve, H, Kaban, A & Bootkrajang, J 2022, '', Machine Learning.

Kaban, A & Durrant, RJ 2020, '', Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Kaban, A 2020, '', Analysis and Applications, vol. 18, no. 5, pp. 929-950.

Conference contribution

Zhou, S, Lei, Y & Kaban, A 2025, . in Proceedings of UAI 2025. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, MLResearchPress, 41st Confenence on Uncertainty in Artificial intelligence, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 21/07/25.

Palias, E & Kaban, A 2024, . in 2024 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)., 10649958, Proceedings of International Joint Conference on Neural Networks, IEEE, 2024 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Yokohama, Japan, 30/06/24.

Zhou, S, Lei, Y & Kaban, A 2024, . in A Bifet, J Davis, T Krilavi膷ius, M Kull, E Ntoutsi & I 沤liobait臈 (eds), Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Research Track: European Conference, ECML PKDD 2024, Vilnius, Lithuania, September 9鈥�13, 2024, Proceedings, Part II. vol. 2, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 14942, Springer, European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Vilnius, Lithuania, 9/09/24.

Huang, Z, Lei, Y & Kaban, A 2023, . in M-R Amin, S Canu, A Fischer, T Guns, PK Novak & G Tsoumakas (eds), Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases: European Conference, ECML PKDD 2022, Grenoble, France, September 19鈥�23, 2022, Proceedings, Part IV. 1 edn, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 13716, Springer, Cham, pp. 587鈥�603, European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Genoble, France, 19/09/22.

Zhou, S, Lei, Y & Kaban, A 2023, . in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems: NeurIPS 2023. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, New Orleans, United States, 10/12/23.

Reeve, HWJ & Kaban, A 2020, . in 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020). 37th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2020), Virtual Event, 12/07/20.