On October 3, the Best Teaching Awards were presented in the ceremonial setting of the Kuppelsaal, where committed teachers and extraordinary courses were honored. The Best Teacher Award 2024 goes to Astrid Weiss from our Research Unit for Human Computer Interaction.

The special prize “Best Gender-sensitive teaching” was awarded to courses that were designed with a visible focus on gender sensitivity. The lecture “ways of thinking in informatics”, held by the following lecturers, was honored with this prize:

• Peter Purgathofer
• Stefan Szeider
• Silvia-Kay Kender
• Christopher Frauenberger
• Michael Pollak
• Naemi Luckner

Congratulations to the winners, and special thanks to all our students for their nominations and their active participation in our courses and lectures!

About Astrid Weiss

Astrid Weiss is Assistant Professor at TU Wien Informatics’ Human Computer Interaction Research Unit. She studied sociology and earned her doctorate in social sciences and Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Salzburg. During her studies, she specialized in methods of empirical social research and applied statistics. After her doctorate, she was a postdoc at the HCI & Usability Unit, at the ICT & S Center, and at the Christian Doppler Laboratory for „Contextual Interfaces“ at the University of Salzburg. She also had research stays at the University of Amsterdam (Intelligent Systems Lab) and the University of Twente (Human Media Interaction Group). Currently, Astrid Weiss is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Visual Computing & Human-Centered Technology at TU Wien Informatics. Weiss is one of Austria’s key figures in the interdisciplinary research field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), as evidenced by numerous articles, lectures, and conference organizations. She is particularly interested in the effects of technology on everyday life and what motivates people to reject or accept technology.

Before joining TU Wien Informatics through an FWF-Elise-Richter grant, Weiss worked as a FWF-Hertha-Firnberg scientist at the Vision4Robotics Group (Institute of Automation and Control, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, TU Wien), researching the effects of faulty robot behavior on human-robot collaboration. Astrid Weiss is regarded as one of the pioneers in the combination of empirical social research and robotics, both in co-designing the research field and in industry-related research. In 2018, she was elected as a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). In April 2022 she successfully defended her habilitation treatise in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Salzburg.

If you want to know more about Astrid Weiss, you can visit her personal website or learn more about her work in our #5QW interview series.

About Best Teaching Award

The Best Teacher Award honors particularly committed teachers at the TU Wien. The award does not refer to an individual course, but to the entire teaching performance of the lecturer. Each semester, almost 30,000 students are supervised in more than 2,100 courses at the TU Wien. Our lecturers’ remarkable performance is the basis for the excellent reputation and worldwide success of TU Wien graduates.

The aim of the Best Teaching Awards is to put committed teachers in the spotlight and thus to honor their commitment. “What is important in teaching is not only what is taught, but especially how it is done. And this is also how the trophy is to be understood: The owl embodies the wisdom that is more in demand now than ever before,” summarizes Jasmin Gründling-Riener, Vice Rector for Academic Affairs.

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