Spotlight on Kidist Amde Mekonnen

As an ELLIS PhD Student, she has two advisors: her primary advisor at the University of Amsterdam & Innovation Center for Artificial Intelligence (ICAI) is Maarten de Rijke, and her secondary advisor, where she’ll have an exchange research visit, is Emine Yilmaz at the University College London.

Long-term, her goal is to make AI for information access more reliable and equitable as data, documents, and user needs evolve. She’s especially interested in retrieval and recommendation methods that are easily updatable, resource-efficient, and straightforward to evaluate, enabling systems to incorporate new information without losing previously learned capabilities.

She says, “This campaign is meaningful to me because research can feel isolating at times, especially when you’re navigating uncertainty or exploring new directions. If sharing my experience helps even one person feel more confident in their path, or less alone in their doubts, then it’s worth it.”