Laura Natali completed the first half of her doctoral studies and she defended her half-time on the 1st of April 2022.
The presentation was held in hybrid format, with part of the audience in the Von Bahr room and the rest connected through zoom. The half-time consisted in a presentation about her past and planned projects and it was followed by a discussion and questions proposed by her opponent Bernhard Mehlig.
The presentation started with a description of her concluded projects about employing neural networks in an epidemic agent-based model, published in Improving epidemic testing and containment strategies using machine learning accepted in Machine Learning: Science and Technology. It continued with her second project, about handling incomplete medical datasets with neural networks, available online as a preprint Neural Network Training with Highly Incomplete Datasets on ArXiv. In the last section, she outlined the proposed continuation of her PhD, with an ongoing project for combining artificial active matter with neural networks.