Idiap awards 2022

For his paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience, A surrogate gradient spiking baseline for speech command recognition, Alexandre Bittar won Idiap’s Paper 2022 Award. The paper represents a new research direction for the institute and its potential impact is quite high as the content constitutes a fundamentally different approach to speech processing. Although the subject is speech commands–isolated words–the neural architecture associated to this publication has potential for good performance and much lower power consumption. In addition, the research is completely open in that the journal is fundamentally open access and the software is also open. The paper only appeared this year. However, it has already formed the basis of two project proposals.

Winner of the student award, Teguh Lembono received his PhD thesis degree on July 28th 2022. He now holds a position at Amazon in Germany as Applied Scientist in Robotics & AI. Lembono was praised for his work by his PhD thesis defense committee. His research contributions addressed challenges at the crossroad of planning, machine learning and optimization, with applications to biped and quadruped robots. He has an excellent overview of the diverse research areas in robotics by mastering both its theoretical and practical aspects. Lembono’s publications have been cited 182 times, giving him an h-index of 7. In addition to his exemplary professional results, he did not hesitate to take time to help others at Idiap. He also co-supervised several BSc/MSc students at EPFL for semester projects.

More information

- Alexandre Bittar’s paper
- Alexandre Bittar’s software
- Teguh Lembono on Git
- Teguh Lembono Google Scholar