Since extraordinary times require extraordinary measures, we held our 30th Epilog online this summer semester. Feel free to join us and tune in from June 24th 2020. Listen to the excellent talks of our graduates who competed for the Distinguished Young Alumn Award, and find out who won the Best Poster Award.

Host and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs, Stefan Woltran gave the floor to Dean Gerti Kappel for her welcome address. “When you have the brains, you should do it!” she addressed the students and reminded them of the TU Wien Informatics motto: Dedicated to Excellence. Committed to Society. She congratulated the graduates heartily, “You have taken your talent, and you have taken the opportunities to make it to the top.”

Distinguished Young Alumn

The best four candidates were selected by a jury, chaired by Margrit Gelautz and consisting of Schahram Dustdar, Georg Fuchsbauer, Eduard Gröller and Sascha Hunold. They presented their excellent diploma theses and competed for the Distinguished Young Alumn Award. Thomas Schlögl convinced the jury with his “very comprehensive presentation” on “An Extension Framework for Epistemic Reasoning in Byzantine Distributed Systems,” which “demonstrates a thorough understanding of the problem and shows potential for follow-up research.” He, therefore, received the Distinguished Young Alumn Award endowed with €1,500 for his outstanding research. His diploma thesis, supervised by Ulrich Schmid and Roman Kuznets, deals with epistemic logic and the asynchronous byzantine framework. The other three best graduates who presented their diploma theses were also honored for their excellent achievements. Sopo Pkhakadze wrote her thesis about “Sequent-Type Calculi for Variants of Default Logic” and was supervised by Hans Tompits. Julian Strohmayer presented “Multi-Modal Fusion of Depth and Thermal Images for Human Behavior Modeling,” supervised by Martin Kampel. Johannes Vass researched on “Exact and Metaheuristic Approaches for the Production Leveling Problem” and was supervised by Nysret Musliu.

History in The Making

Taking a look back in history, Stefan Woltran made the audience aware of some interesting facts: How many female winners turned out of 30 Epilogs? Four women won the Distinguished Young Alumn Award until now, “that is 13 percent and mirrors the number of female students graduating at TU Wien Informatics. Both numbers should be improved, of course.” Woltran also pointed out remarkable careers of former Epilog winners, as there are Clemens Fruhwirt as the first winner in 2005, now Senior Software Engineer at Google Switzerland, Emanuel Sallinger, Assistant Professor at TU Wien Informatics and head of the Knowledge Graph Lab, Ronald de Haan, Assistant Professor at the Institute for Logic, Language & Computation (University of Amsterdam), Anela Lolic, a postdoctoral researcher at the TU Wien Faculty of Mathematics and Geoinformation and funded by a L’Oréal Austria Fellowship, and last but not least, Mathias Lechner, PhD Student at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST), to name only a few. According to Stefan Woltran, “excellent theses require guidance and supervision—thank you to the respective supervisors.” Epilog statistics list Reinhard Pichler as supervisor of five winners, Andreas Steininger and Nysret Musliu supervised three winners each, and Michael Wimmer’s students were successful Epilog winners for two times.

Best Poster Award

Also, a novelty this time due to the Coronavirus situation: TU Wien Informatics staff were asked to cast their vote for one of the eight nominees for the Best Poster Award. The lucky winner of the award, endowed with € 500 and supervised by Geraldine Fitzpatrick, was Lukas Nagl with his poster presentation “Towards Maintainable Physical Activity Behavior Change: Designing for Reflection in a Technological Intervention.”, focussing on non-communicable diseases such as heart disease or diabetes and physical activity with computer-based intervention related to it.

Find the Epilog event online here.

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