About me

Ah yes, I’ve been expecting you!

Anyways, my name is Ričards Marcinkevičs (rɪʧɑrdz mɑrtsɪnkɛvɪʧ; Russian: Ричард Марцинкевич). I was born in Rīga, Latvia, in 1995.

I did my doctorate at the Institute for Machine Learning, Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich. I was a Medical Data Science group member supervised by Prof. Dr. Julia E. Vogt and co-advised by Prof. Dr. Fanny Yang. In July 2024, I passed my doctoral exam with the thesis titled “Explore, Support, and Interact: Scaling Interpretable and Explainable Machine Learning up to Realities of Biomedical Data”.

Before pursuing a doctoral degree, I obtained an M.Sc. in Statistics at the Seminar for Statistics, ETH Zurich, and a B.Sc. in Knowledge Engineering and Data Science at the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering (DKE), Maastricht University. During my master’s thesis, I worked on causal inference in time series for identifying molecular fingerprints during sleep under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Joachim M. Buhmann and Dr. Đorđe Miladinović. During my bachelor’s, I interned for two years at the Medtronic Bakken Research Center (BRC) in Maastricht.

My research interests include interpretable and explainable machine learning, in particular, inductive biases for neural networks that may render the model more interpretable in specific use-cases. I am also interested in how we can leverage interpretations and explanations to obtain actionable insights about the data or the model itself, for instance, to perform scientific discovery or make the predictions fairer and more robust? From the application perspective, I have worked on time series and survival analysis and participated in several interdisciplinary projects leveraging ML methods to analyse biomedical data.

In my leisure time, I enjoy learning about classic Russian literature and ancient history. Like many Latvians, I love contemplating the meaning of life by the Baltic Sea and occasional angling.

Starting from September 2024, I am on the job market. I would love to hear about new opportunities!