National Statistics Award

The INE has awarded the National Statistics Award in its 2024 edition to María Concepción Bielza Lozoya, Professor in the Statistics and Operations Research area at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM), for the quality and impact of her scientific contributions in the field of statistics.

The Award jury highlighted her contribution to strengthening the statistical methods that underpin machine learning and artificial intelligence, as well as their application to such socially relevant fields as medicine, bioinformatics, industry, neuroscience and astrophysics.

Concepción Bielza received UPM's Special PhD Award in 1996 and UPM's Research Award in 2014. She is a member of the Transfer Committee of the Spanish Royal Mathematical Society and founder of the Computational Intelligence Group (CIG) at UPM and the ELLIS Unit Madrid, which she has also co-chaired since 2009 and 2022 respectively.

His research career began in the 1990s in the Decision Analysis and Statistics Group at UPM, where he proposed influence diagrams with partial information in the inputs (uncertainties and preferences), explanation of optimal decisions or approximate resolution by simulation. Since then, her main contributions have focused on the integration of statistical methods in the development of machine learning techniques, driving many areas such as Bayesian networks, evolutionary computation, anomaly detection or multivariate time series.

He has combined this activity with the training of a large group of researchers and has supervised 23 doctoral dissertations.

Her contributions to medicine and neuroscience - many related to the treatment of diseases such as HIV, cancer, COVID-19, Alzheimer's or Parkinson's - are remarkable. In the industrial field, she has also contributed to many areas such as energy efficiency and forecasting, industrial cyber-attack detection or monitoring the health of bridges and road/rail crossings, a field in which she is leading a European patent on the health of infrastructures.

In addition, she has been involved in 64 public projects, 18 as Principal Investigator (including 11 international), and 38 with private institutions, 25 as Principal Investigator.

Internationally, Concepción Bielza received the Amity Research in Machine Learning Award in 2020, is a Senior in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers - a global professional association for advanced technology - since 2022, an ELLIS Fellow since 2023, and a Fellow of the Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association this year.

She has also been elected to the Scientific Advisory Board of the Norwegian Research Centre for AI Innovation in 2021 and is a member of research evaluation panels in Portugal, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Denmark and various European agencies such as the European Research Council and the European Network of AI Excellence Centres ELISE.

The winner of the 2024 National Statistics Award has published 6 books, 176 articles, 44 book chapters, four special issues of journals, 76 conference papers and 181 conference contributions, of which 11 were plenary papers.

Two of her articles are Highly Cited Papers (Top 1%), and he has appeared in Stanfor's World Top 2% Most Cited Scientists list in 2022 and 2023.

It has organised 19 scientific congresses or events, collaborating with various European and Spanish bodies, international agencies, universities and foundations.

And she is one of the directors of the Machine Learning and Advanced Statistics Summer School, with 16 editions and more than 80 students per year.