On December 6, 2022, TU Wien Informatics gathered at TUtheSky to award the faculty’s most outstanding students. Host Stefan Woltran, Head of the Research Unit Databases and AI and Co-Head of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (CAIML), guided through an evening of celebrating our students’ achievements.

In her welcoming address, Dean Gerti Kappel emphasized the importance of nurturing, maintaining, and appreciating academic excellence from the very beginning and throughout all stages of education, training, and career steps. With the Epilog award show, TU Wien Informatics aims at promoting inspiring young talents as well as the future of research, knowledge, and expertise.

The promising students were honored with the Distinguished Young Alumn Award, the Siemens Awards for Excellence, the prestigious Bachelor With Honors Certificates, and the Best Poster Award.

Distinguished Young Alumn Award

This semester, nine Master graduates were nominated for the Distinguished Young Alumn Award. Out of all candidates, the jury members Margrit Gelautz, Renata Raidou, Emanuel Sallinger, Maria Christakis and Ezio Bartocci selected three nominees to present their theses in a ten-minute talk at the Epilog finale. The graduates Markus Böck, Lea Brugger and Bernhard Pointner competed for the prestigious title endowed with € 1,500. After evaluating the finalists’ presentations and performance in the Q&A rounds, the jury decided to crown Lea Brugger the winner. Head of the jury, Margrit Gelautz, handed over the certificate to the new Distinguished Young Alumn.

Lea Brugger was supervised by Laura Kovács. The title of her thesis is “Automating Proofs of Game-Theoretic Security Properties of Off-Chain Protocols”. Finalist Markus Böck wrote his thesis on “Machine Learning for Interactive Performance Prediction” and was supervised by Jürgen Cito. Bernhard Pointner’s thesis “An Interactive Visualization Approach to Tackle Design Constraints in a Rule-Based Recommendation System” was supervised by Silvia Miksch.

Siemens Awards for Excellence

Every winter term, the faculty is honoring the best female Bachelor and Master students with the Siemens Awards for Excellence. The prize endowed with € 1,000 is sponsored by our partners from Siemens AG. It was a great pleasure having Werner Schöfberger, head of the Process Automation Business Unit at Siemens, hand over the certificates to the awardees of the academic year 2021/22 Christina Tüchler, Sonja Gerstenmayer, Marit Einböck, Doris Rhomberg, Katharina Weindl, and Silke Buchberger.

Bachelors with Honors

Our excellence program Bachelor with Honors enables students to deepen their knowledge and inspires them for scientific research at an early stage of their academic careers. Vice Dean of Academic Affairs, Hilda Tellioglu, handed over the certificates to Laurenz Stampfl and Daniel May for their outstanding achievements. The Certificates of Honors include a personal letter of recommendation by the Rector of TU Wien, stating the excellence of the students and their promising qualifications.

Best Poster Award

As part of every Epilog, the winner of the Best Poster Award was announced. This semester, the prize endowed with € 500 went to graduate Leonhard Esterbauer. The title of his poster is “Improving energy community interoperability: a Web of Things approach”, the master thisis was supervised by Wolfgang Kastner. With 42 of 99 votes, the awarded poster was the clear winner of the faculty-wide online voting. The award is recognizing the students’ efforts in visualizing their research and results.