Pepa Atanasova, PhD graduate at the University of Copenhagen, wins the first edition of the Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award with her thesis titled “Accountable and Explainable Methods for Complex Reasoning over Text”. The Award, sponsored by Springer, was presented during the 19th European Computer Science Summit (ECSS 2023), an in-person event in Edinburgh, UK. Apart from the winner, the four runners-up were selected by the Award Committee (sorted by last name in alphabetical order):

• 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".

Learn more about the Award and 2023 winner in the post-ceremony press-release.

We close this year process by warmly thanking the 2023 Award Committee:

• Elisabetta Di Nitto, Politecnico di Milano (Chair)
• Jean Marc Jézequel, IRISA / University of Rennes
• Gregor Engels, Universität Paderborn
• Harald Gall, University of Zurich
• Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Groningen.

Tobias Röddiger, a PhD graduate from the Department of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), won the second edition of the Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award with his thesis titled “Earables: Wearable Computing on the Ears”. The Award, sponsored by Springer, was presented during the 20th European Informatics Leaders Summit (ECSS 2024), an in-person event in Sliema, Malta. Apart from the winner, two runners-up were selected by the Award Committee (sorted by last name in alphabetical order):

• Tim Quatmann, Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University (Germany) with the dissertation “Verification of Multi-Objective Markov Models”;

• Michael Sammler, Saarland University and Max Planck Institute for Software Systems (Germany), with the dissertation “Automated and Foundational Verification of Low-Level Programs".

Learn more about the Award, 2024 winner and runners-up in the post-ceremony press release.

We close this year's process by warmly thanking the 2024 Award Committee:

• Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Groningen, the Netherlands (Co-Chair)
• Harald Gall, University of Zurich, Switzerland (Co-Chair)
• Premek Brada, University of West Bohemia, Czech Republic
• Manuel Carro, Technical University of Madrid / IMDEA Software Institute, Spain
• Dympna O'Sullivan, TU Dublin, Ireland

Andrea Cini, PhD graduate from the Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana (Switzerland), won the third edition of the Informatics Europe 2025 Best Dissertation Award (BDA) with his thesis titled “Graph Deep Learning for Time Series Forecasting”. The Award, sponsored by Springer, was presented during the 21st European Informatics Leaders Summit (ECSS 2025), an in-person event in Rennes, France. This year saw a record 34 nominations for the Award. Alongside the winner, three runners-up and two distinguished finalists were honoured.

Runners-up

• Nathan Cassee, TU Eindhoven (NL): “Sentiment in Software Engineering”
• Erasmo Purificato, Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg (DE): “Fairness Analysis of Graph Neural Networks for Behavioral User Modeling”
• Drishti Yadav, TU Wien (AT): “Enhancing Fault Diagnosis in Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems”

Distinguished finalists

• Federica Filippini, Politecnico di Milano (IT): “Resource Allocation and Scheduling Problems in Computing Continua for AI Applications”
• Shuzhe Wang, Aalto University (FI): “Deep Learning Methods for Point Matching, Visual Localization and 3D Reconstruction”

Learn more about the Award, 2025 winner, runners-up and distinguished finalists in the post-ceremony press release.

We close this year's process by warmly thanking the 2025 Award Committee:

• Premek Brada, University of West Bohemia, Czechia (Co-Chair)
• Dimka Karastoyanova, University of Groningen, the Netherlands (Co-Chair)
• Marco Aiello, University of Stuttgart, Germany
• Gert Jervan, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
• Ernestina Menasalvas, Technical University of Madrid, Spain