Heidi Seibold, leader of the 'Open AI in Health' Helmholtz AI team, has been nominated for the AI Newcomer 2021 – the AI Newcomer program of the German Informatics Society sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). She is now on the shortlist for the 'Natural and Life Sciences' discipline, which includes three female and three male candidates. From January 18th until March 7th, two AI Newcomers per discipline can be selected from the shortlists by public voting which makes for 30% of the overall evaluation (70% comes from the jury's decision).

The purpose of the AI Newcomers award is to make visible new talents who have already achieved outstanding success in the various fields of research and activity in AI and who can be expected to have a significant influence on AI research in the future. The goal is to demystify AI technologies and to open up the topic to a broad public. To this end, a clear focus is placed on involving the public in the nomination and voting phase.

Seibold studied statistics at LMU Munich. In her PhD at the University of Zurich, she developed new machine learning methods for personalised medicine, which are available as open source software. Today, she leads the 'Open AI in Health' group within Helmholtz AI at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. She is an Knowledge Exchange expert, representative of the German Reproducibility Network, and leads the Open Science Initiative in Medicine of the LMU Open Science Center. She is on the steering committee of the online platform OpenML (Open Machine Learning) and develops open source software. In her research, she combines Artificial Intelligence, Open Science and health research with the goal of making AI and its application in health research transparent, trustworthy and reproducible. Her dream is for research and its components (data, code, etc) to be accessible to all. This could not only improve and fasten the research itself, but in the end also improve or even save human lives.

Among the shortlisted candidates for the 'Natural and Life Sciences' discipline, there is also Benjamin Schubert, team leader at the Institute of Computational Biology (Helmholtz Zentrum München) aiming to develop more effective and safe vaccines and biotherapeutics using AI methods, and Christian Matek, also a researcher at the Institute of Computational Biology (Helmholtz Zentrum München) who is applying machine learning methods to questions about the diagnosis and pathophysiology of blood diseases such as leukemias.

The winners of the AI Newcomers program will be announced at and be part of the KI-Camp on April 27th in Berlin (https://kicamp.org/en). There, they the will be given the chance to present their work to a large audience in the format of a 'Science Slam‘, a short entertaining presentation, and will receive an official certificate.

Cast your vote before March 7th!