University of Copenhagen PhD Graduate Wins 2023 Best Dissertation Award
We are delighted to announce Pepa Atanasova, a PhD graduate from University of Copenhagen, Denmark as the winner of Informatics Europe 2023 Best Dissertation Award.
This year marks the inaugural launch of the Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award (BDA). The Award, sponsored by Springer, was presented at a special ceremony on 24 October, during the 19th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS 2023), an in-person event in Edinburgh, UK. The BDA is an annual award designed to recognize outstanding PhD dissertations in informatics. Its primary goal is to encourage and recognise emerging researchers in informatics and related disciplines while sharing exceptional informatics research with the Informatics Europe community and beyond.
Pepa Atanasova expresses her deep gratitude for receiving this year’s Award with her thesis titled “Accountable and Explainable Methods for Complex Reasoning over Text”. "In this dissertation, I address the critical challenge of enhancing the accountability and transparency of Machine Learning (ML) models, with a specific focus on identifying vulnerabilities in fact-checking models and proposing robust solutions to improve their accountability. My research contributions extend to pioneering methods for crafting natural language explanations (NLEs) under resource constraints, prioritizing clarity and coherence in these explanations. Additionally, the dissertation introduces a comprehensive framework for evaluating explainability techniques, providing valuable insights to advance this field. Receiving this prestigious award from Informatics Europe fills me with immense pride and serves as a motivating force to continue advancing the trustworthiness of ML models in practical, real-world applications. I look forward to contributing further to the development of accountable and transparent AI systems that benefit society at large."
On behalf of the Award Committee, Prof. Elisabetta Di Nitto (Politecnico di Milano), Vice President of Informatics Europe and the BDA Committee Chair, presented the Award to Pepa at the award ceremony. She shares, “This year’s Award has garnered significant interest from institutions and students across Europe. We congratulate Pepa for her outstanding achievement. We’d also like to congratulate the four runners-up of this year’s Award, acknowledging their remarkable work and their promising commitment to leveraging informatics for positive societal change.” The four runners-up, sorted by last name in alphabetical order, are:
- Salvatore Di Girolamo, ETH Zurich with the dissertation "Application-driven network and storage optimizations"
- Sebastian Hofstätter, TU Wien with the dissertation "Optimizing the cost-effectiveness tradeoff in neural ranking"
- Shiwei Liu, Eindhoven University of Technology with the dissertation "Sparse neural network training with in-time over-parameterization"
- Francesco Pierri, Politecnico di Milano with the dissertation "Characterization and detection of disinformation spreading in online social networks"
The Best Dissertation Award carries a prize of 3,000 EUR, sponsored by Springer Nature as part of their sponsorship to Informatics Europe. It includes also an invitation to publish the winning thesis in Springer’s Computer Science program. “Springer is deeply impressed by the high-quality nominations received for the Award. We are excited about our continued partnership with Informatics Europe, and we are proud to provide support to informatics researchers at all stages of their careers, not only through the Award but also other collaborative initiatives.”, explains Welmoed Spahr, Vice President Computer Science Books. To discover more about Springer, please visit www.springer.com.
About the Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award (BDA)
The BDA is an annual award recognizing excellent PhD dissertation in Informatics from one of the member universities of Informatics Europe. This year, the Award Committee received 19 nominations, each resulting from a preliminary selection at each individual institution. All candidates were nominated as the best dissertation representing their institutions in the academic years 2021-2022 or 2022-2023, but on or before December 31, 2022. The Committee has organized the nomination review process in two phases. In the first phase, each dissertation was reviewed by two committee members. The seven dissertations considered excellent by both reviewers were moved to the second phase in which each committee member reviewed and ranked all of them. The ranking was presented and discussed by the committee during a consensus meeting, where 1 winner and 4 runners-up were selected. To learn more about the Award, visit www.informatics-europe.org/research/best-dissertation-award.html.
About Informatics Europe
Informatics Europe represents the academic and research community in informatics (or computer science) in Europe. Bringing together university departments, research laboratories and industry, Informatics Europe has nearly 200 member institutions in more than 30 countries, connecting over 50,000 informatics researchers in Europe and beyond. Informatics Europe creates a strong voice to promote concerted positions and acts on shared priorities in the areas of education, research, knowledge transfer and social impact of informatics. Explore our website to learn more about our projects and services.