Liang Telkamp awarded an Amsterdam AI Thesis Award!

Liang Telkamp, TRL Lab alumni, has received the Amsterdam AI Thesis award for her thesis on Contextual Sensitive Data Detection. Many congrats!

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We’re proud that Liang Telkamp has been awarded an Amsterdam AI Thesis Award for her master thesis on LLM- and retrieval-augmented contextual sensitive data detection 🎉! Liang, master student in the AI program at the UvA, conducted her thesis at the TRL Lab at CWI under supervision of Madelon in collaboration with the United Nations. The award was presented to her during the Amsterdam AI Impact Festival where she pitched the work. Many congrats to Liang for this impressive achievement!

Liang’s thesis motivates contextually assessing data sensitivity beyond and including personal data. The use-case with data from the UN’s Humanitarian Data Exchange platform (https://data.humdata.org/) illustrates the difficulty and importance of this problem, and surfaces the effectiveness of integrating context in the form of, for example, regional data policies in data sensitivity detection.

But the impact of the project did not end with the thesis: it’s great to see that Liang and the UN team are currently working on the integration of the developed mechanisms in the HDX platform to actually avoid that sensitive humanitarian data ends up in wrong hands or LLM training corpora! 👏

Thesis: here
Paper (ArXiv): https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04120
GitHub repo: https://github.com/trl-lab/sensitive-data-detection