ITU researcher wants to improve statistics models
Professor Andrzej Wasowski has been granted DKK 6.1 million from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The grant is given for a project that is looking into how probabilistic models can become more reliable.
Andrzej WasowskiResearchsoftware
Written 26 June, 2025 07:32
In a time where it is important that research can be trusted – and not easily discredited – researchers from the IT University of Copenhagen wants to make scientific software more reliable for researchers, who are not programmers. The project is led by Professor Andrzej Wasowski.
“I think we all realise that science is very important today, and we are all benefitting from scientific development, not only in technology, but also in for example healthcare and medicine, food production or in climate research. However, as researchers we also understand that it is quite easy to undermine the importance or validity of science, and some people will try to do that. And if science cannot be trusted then everything our society is built on will collapse,” says Andrzej Wasowski, “as researchers we should not help the people trying to undermine us, by producing invalid research results. It's very important that internally, as researchers, we have methods to ensure that what we are building actually describes and analyses what we want. I hope this project makes it easier for researchers to produce valid and reliable results.”
Researchers often use statistics to analyse their data. For example, it can be used in healthcare to research effects of treatments or developments of diseases, or in social sciences to research social tendencies, attitudes or behaviour. It is therefore a widely used tool for all types of research. Having good models is a prerequisite for making trustworthy research.
“We are going to test scientific software that does statistics. We call this probabilistic software or probabilistic programs. Researchers are often not programmers by training, and they do not have the same process for testing and quality assurance as software engineers. So, we want to help our fellow researchers in other academic areas, and we want to build tools that are specifically aimed at these programs for ensuring quality for them,” says Andrzej Wasowski, “we want to guide or support scientists, who are building models, to make the right models.”
The project is entitled “PRO-TEST: Probabilistic Testing of Probabilistic Programs”. For the project Andrzej Wasowski has received DKK 6.1 million from the Independent Research Fund Denmark. The project will be conducted in the Software Quality Research (SQUARE) research group at IT University of Copenhagen.
Theis Duelund Jensen, Press Officer, phone +45 2555 0447, email thej@itu.dk