Due to the ongoing pandemic situation in this winter semester, the 33rd Epilog ceremony was once again held online. In the well-attended virtual event our Zoom audience witnessed the four best candidates compete for the Distinguished Young Alumn Award, the presentation of the Siemens’ Awards of Excellence, the awarding of the prestigious Bachelor with Honors certificates as well as the Best Poster Award winner. Additionally, Daniela Borgmann from Siemens Austria presented her keynote talk about „Applying Energy Management and Predictive Maintenance using Edge and Cloud Computing”.

Host and Vice Dean of Academic Affairs, Stefan Woltran gave the floor to Rector Sabine Seidler who after congratulating all candidates, emphasized to use the experience of the last two years as an opportunity to think about a future hybrid University version, in which to accommodate both the different needs of physical contact and of virtual and ubiquitous spaces.

Additionally, TU Wien Informatics Dean Gerti Kappel stated the importance of the EPILOG event, in which, twice a year, the best of the best of the Faculty of Informatics will be awarded: “We try to deliver excellence at all levels.”

Distinguished Young Alumn

Each semester the most outstanding master students are awarded for their exceptional research work. The best four candidates were selected by a jury consisting of Margrit Gelautz, Andreas Steininger, Jiehua Chen, Thomas Gärtner and Renata Georgia Raidou. By presenting their excellent diploma theses, the candidates competed for the Distinguished Young Alumn Award. The judgement of the jury based both on the written thesis as well as on its presentation.

Finally, Sebastian Mazza convinced the jury with his excellent presentation on “Homomorphic-Encrypted Volume Rendering” and the high relevance of the topic for specific sectors, especially in healthcare. He, therefore, received the Distinguished Young Alumn Award endowed with €1,500 for his outstanding research. His diploma thesis, supervised by Ivan Viola, opens up the possibility for a secure and privacy-preserving remote volume-rendering approach.

The other three best graduates who presented their diploma theses were also honored for their excellent achievements. Axel Brunnbauer wrote his thesis about “Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Racing” and was supervised by Radu Grosu. Tobias Geibinger presented “Investigating Constraint Programming and Hybrid Answer-set Solving for Industrial Test Laboratory Scheduling“, supervised by Nysret Musliu. Viktoriia Korchemna researched “The Complexity of Bayesian Network Learning: Revisiting the Superstructure” and was supervised by Robert Ganian.

Keynote Speaker – Daniela Borgmann

In her keynote talk on “Applying Energy Management and Predictive Maintenance using Edge and Cloud Computing”, Daniela Borgmann, Project Lead for R&D Solutions at Siemens Austria, focused on how to turn data into value and highlighted the future importance of data science. At the end of her presentation, Borgmann, who studied Bioinformatics at the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, addressed the candidates to “always stay motivated and interested in new things”.

The Siemens Award for Excellence —Promoting Women

With its excellence program, Siemens AG Austria has been supporting TU Wien Informatics’ efforts to aiming at gender balance and promoting excellent female students in a successful research career for more than a decade now. Michael Freyny, Head of Digital Industries in Austria and Central and Eastern Europe from Siemens Austria presented the Siemens Award for Excellence each worth € 1,000 to the eight awardees: The Bachelor students Lisa Fürst, Sonja Gerstenmayer, Christina Tüchler (all Media Informatics and Visual Computing) and Sophia Schober (Software and Information Engineering) and to the master scholarship holders Jasmine Haider (Logic and Computation), Theresa Müller (Software Engineering and Internet Computing), Raffaela Pichler (Media and Human-Centered Computing) and Timea Toth (Data Science).

“Siemens is very proud to support the programme of TU Vienna and strongly believes in the importance of building bridges between University and the industry in order to get the students prepared for their future jobs.

He also encouraged the candidates to have an open mindset and to use the opportunity to work in different countries. Moreover, Michael Freyny addressed the students with a sincere career advice: “Whenever you need to make career decisions, try to find what you are really good at and competitive about and build up on your strength. But most importantly: Be passionate about what you do!”

Celebrating Excellence

Dean of Academic Affairs Hilda Tellioglu gave an overview about the excellence program of the Faculty, enabling talented students to deepen their knowledge. It inspires them for scientific research at an early stage in their academic careers and allows them to participate in industry internships and study abroad programs. Andreas Auer, Adrian Chmurovic, Alexander Falzberger and Christoph Günther from Software and Information Engineering were introduced and awarded their Certificates of Honors, including a personal letter of recommendation by the Rector of TU Wien, stating that they belong to the Top 5 percent of students at TU Wien.

Voting for the Best Poster

Visualizing the complexity of research in a limited space is a challenging endeavor. Therefore, TU Wien Informatics staff were asked to cast their vote for one of the nominees for the Best Poster Award. The lucky winner of the award, endowed with € 500 was Tamara Drucks with her poster presentation “Representation Learning for Variable-Sized Multiple Sequence Alignments”, supervised by Nysret Musliu, Jury Chair Margrit Gelautz highlighted that the winning poster manages to explain the problems and relations in a highly instructive and very appealing way.

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