Prof. Dr. Matthias Schonlau from the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo (Canada) has received a research award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The research award, which is endowed with 60,000 €, is linked to a research stay in Germany with the aim of strengthening scientific cooperation across national borders. Prof. Schonlau will initially spend six months at GESIS and then another six months at the University of Mannheim.
Prof. Schonlau receives the award in recognition of his outstanding achievements in research and teaching. Dr. Bernd Weiß nominated Prof. Dr. Schonlau for the award on behalf of GESIS and is now looking forward to the joint scientific work with the renowned scientist: " I am very much looking forward to working with Prof. Schonlau on the automated classification of answers to open-ended questions from the GESIS Panel during his research stay. This will include testing the use of NLP language models with neural networks (deep learning) in survey research.
Professor Schonlau is one of the most internationally renowned researchers at the interface of survey methodology and machine learning. He is one of the pioneers in the analysis of web surveys and has recently made important contributions to the analysis and classification of open-ended questions.