AWARDS & PRIZES

2024

Alice Guntli
EPFL Faulhaber Prize - Thesis Award
Planning with optimal control: Application to robot manipulation with a mobile bimanual platform
October 2024

Darya Baranouskaya
EPFL STI Teaching Assistant Award
October 2024

Olena Hrynenko
EPFL STI Teaching Assistant Award
October 2024

X. Quan, M. Valentino, L. A. Dennis, A. Freitas
Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP
Paper: Verification and Refinement of Natural Language Explanations through LLM-Symbolic Theorem Proving
November 2024

W. Lu, H. Yu, J. Wang, D. Teney, H. Wang, Y. Chen, Q. Yang, X . Xie, X. Ji
Outstanding Contribution Award, International Workshop on Federated Foundation Models (NeurIPS 2024)
Paper: ZooPFL: Exploring Black-Box Foundation Models for Personalized Federated Learning
December 2024

Daniel Gatica-Perez
EPFL Digital Humanities Section Teacher Award
December 2024

Sébastien Marcel
IEEE Fellow
December 2024

Sébastien Marcel
Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR)
November 2024

Lakmal Meegahapola
EDEE PhD Thesis Distinction Award at EPFL. Thesis: Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life
October 2024

Y. Li, X. Chi, A. Razmjoo and S Calinon - Outstanding Best Paper Award Finalist
Robotics: Science and Systems 2024. Paper: Configuration Space Distance Fields for Manipulation Planning
July 2024

S. Shetty, T. Lembono, T. Löw and S. Calinon - Best Paper Award (two tied-up winners)
from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committee on Model-based Optimization for Robotics, for articles accepted/published in 2023
Paper: Tensor Train for Global Optimization Problems in Robotics
June 2024

Anshul Gupta, Pierre Vuillecard, Arya Farkhondeh, Jean-Marc Odobez – Best Paper Award
from the 6th International Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild (GAZE 2024) at CVPR 2024
for their paper “Exploring the Zero-Shot Capabilities of Vision-Language Models for Improving Gaze Following”
June 2024

Aurel Maeder, Lakmal Meegahapola, and Daniel Gatica-Perez - Special Recognition for Sustainable Practices
at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI)
for their paper: Learning about Social Context from Smartphone Data: Generalization Across Countries and Daily Life Moments.
May 2024

Anshul Gupta, Samy Tafasca, Naravich Chutisilp and Jean-Marc Odobez – Best student paper award
at the 18th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition
for their paper “A Unified Model for Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction”
May 2024

Hatef Otroshi Shahreza and Sébastien Marcel - 3rd place in the AI Safety Prize for their work on 3D face reconstruction from deep facial embeddings
at Swiss Cyber Security Days
for the paper: GaFaR: Geometry-aware Face Reconstruction
February 2024

2023

AiRLIHockey Team, with J. Jankowski, A. Marić and S Calinon
Winner of the NeurIPS 2023 Robot Air Hockey Challenge
December 2023

Hatef Otroshi Shahreza and Sébastien Marcel received honourable mentions for their impressive ideas about vulnerabilities of face recognition systems
from the Pour Demain think tank that organizes the AI Safety Prize
December 2023

Lakmal Meegahapola was named a finalist of the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award
at the ACM Ubicomp/ISWC conference
October 2023

Lakmal Meegahapola, William Droz, and Daniel Gatica-Perez received an IMWUT Distinguished Paper Award
by the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies
for their paper Generalization and Personalization of Mobile Sensing-Based Mood Inference Models: An Analysis of College Students in Eight Countries
October 2023

Hatef Otroshi received the EAB Research Award 2023
from the European Association for Biometrics for his significant contribution to the field of biometrics research and innovations in Europe
September 2023

Pavel Korshunov, Haolin Chen, Philip N. Garner, and Sébastien Marcel received the best poster award
at the IJCB 2023 IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics
for their paper Vulnerability of Automatic Identity Recognition to Audio-Visual Deepfakes
September 2023

Idiap's Biometrics Security and Privacy group was ranked first in the "Compact Models" track of the "Efficient Face Recognition Competition"
at the IJCB 2023 IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics
for their conference paper EFaR 2023: Efficient Face Recognition Competition
September 2023

Mathew Magimai-Doss and his colleagues Dimitri Palaz and Ronan Collobert received ISCA Award for the Best Paper published in Speech Communication (2018-2022)
at the Interspeech 2023 conference
for their paper End-to-End Acoustic Modeling using Convolutional Neural Networks for HMM-based Automatic Speech Recognition
August 2023

Haeeun Kim and Daniel Gatica-Perez received an Honorable Mention Award
at the IMX '23 conference
for their paper Referencing in YouTube Knowledge Communication Videos
August 2023

Ina Kodrasi received the Outstanding Reviewer Recognition
at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)
June 2023

Hervé bourlard was awarded the title of Life Fellow
from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
January 2023

2022

Sylvain Calinon and his colleagues from CNRS received the12 stars of Europe 2022 award
from the Minister of Higher Education and Research for their European H2020 MEMMO project
December 2022

Angelos Katharopoulos received the Best Doctoral Thesis Award in Electrical Engineering
from EPFL for his PhD thesis entitled Stop Wasting my FLOPS: Improving the Efficiency of Deep Learning Models
November 2022

Daniel Gatica-Perez won the ACM ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award 2022
at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Bengaluru, India
November 2022

Daniel Gatica-Perez and his colleagues receives the Ten-Year Impact Award in Ubiquitous Computing
at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)
for the paper StressSense: Detecting Stress in Unconstrained Acoustic Environments using Smartphones
September 2022

Sylvain Calinon, Adrien Escande, Yue Hu, and Patrick Wensing won the IEEE RAS Most Active Technical Committee Award
IEEE RAS Most Active Technical Committee Award
August 2022

2021

Ina Kodrasi won the Best PhD Award
at the EUSIPCO 2020
January 2021

Thibaut Kulak received the Best Poster Award 
during the Workshop "Towards Curious Robots: Modern Approaches for Intrinsically-Motivated Intelligent Behavior" at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021)
for his paper Intrinsically-Motivated Robot Learning of Bayesian Probabilistic Movement Primitives
June 2021

Hervé Bourlard received the IEEE James L. Flanagan Award 
Awarded for the first time to a Swiss researcher, this prestigious prize, was jointly awarded to Prof. Hervé Bourlard, Idiap’s director and head of the Speech & Audio Processing research group, and his colleague Prof. Nelson Morgan from the Berkeley University (USA).
July 2021

Weipeng He won the EPFL Electrical Engineering Doctoral Program PhD Thesis Distinction 
for the PhD thesis Deep learning approaches for auditory perception in robotics
2021

2020

Lakmal Meegahapola was nominated Exemplary Reviewer
by the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters journal
January 2020

Trinh-Minh-Tri Do and Daniel Gatica-Perez won the 10-year Impact Award
at the 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous and Mobile Multimedia (MUM) 2020
with their paper By their apps you shall understand them: mining large-scale patterns of mobile phone usage
Social computing group
November 2020

2019

Ina Kodrasi and Simon Doclo won the Award for outstanding publications in information technology
from the ITG 2019
with their paper Analysis of Eigenvalue Decomposition-Based Late Reverberation Power Spectral Density Estimation
November 2019

Noémie Jaquier won the Best Presentation Award
at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL)
with her paper Bayesian Optimization Meets Riemannian Manifolds in Robot Learning
Robot learning & interaction group
November 2019

Tiago de Freitas Pereira won the Research Award
from the European Association for Biometrics
with his paper Learning How To Recognize Faces in Heterogeneous Environments
Biometrics security & privacy group
September 2019

Pavel Korshunov won the Best Paper Award
at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
with his paper Tampered Speaker Inconsistency Detection with Phonetically Aware Audio-visual Features
Biometrics security & privacy group
June 2019

Thanh-Trung Phan, Skanda Muralidhar, Daniel Gatica-Perez won the Honorable Mention Paper Award
at the International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare
with their paper #Drink Or #Drunk: Multimodal Signals and Drinking Practices on Instagram
Social computing group
May 2019

Raghavendra Ramachandra, Sushma Venkatesh, Kiran Raja, Sushil Bhattacharjee, Pankaj S Wasnik, Sébastien Marcel, Christoph Busch won the Best paper Award
from the International Association for Pattern Recognition
with their paper Custom Silicon Face Masks: Vulnerability on Commercial Face Recognition Systems & Presentation Attack Detection
Biometrics security & privacy group
May 2019

Christian Jaques won the Best paper Award
at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging
with his paper Multi-Spectral Widefield Microscopy of the Beating Heart through Post-Acquisition Synchronization and Unmixing
Computational bioimaging group
April 2019

2018

Adrian Shajkofci won the Best Student Paper Award
at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing
with his paper Semi-Blind Spatially-Variant Deconvolution in Optical Microscopy with Local Point Spread Function Estimation by Use of Convolutional Neural Networks
Computational bioimaging group
October 2018

David Ginsbourger named Oustand Reviewer
at the International Conference on Machine Learning
Read more...
Uncertainty quantification and optimal design group
July 2018

2017

Nikolaos Pappas, Andrei Popescu-Belis won the Best paper Award
at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing
with their paper Multilingual Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification
Natural Language Processing group
December 2017

Daniel Gatica-Perez received the Community Service Award
at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction
Read more...
Social computing group
November 2017

Sylvain Calinon won the Best Paper Award
of the Intelligent Service Robotics (ISR) journal
with his paper A Tutorial on Task-Parameterized Movement Learning and Retrieval
Robot learning and interaction group
June 2017

James Newling, Francois Fleuret won the Best Paper Award
at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics
with their paper A Sub-Quadratic Exact Medoid Algorithm
Machine learning group
April 2017

Subhadeep Dey won the Ganesh N. Ramaswamy Memorial Student Grant
from the IEEE
with his paper Exploiting Sequence Information for Text-Dependentspeaker Verification
Speech and audio processing group
March 2017

Jean-Marc Odobez received the best associate Editor Award
from the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and System for Video Technology
2017

2016

Dario Azzimonti won the C. Moser Award for outstanding Ph.D. or M.Sc. theses within the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science
of the University of Bern
with his thesis Contributions to Bayesian set estimation relying on random field priors
Uncertainty quantification and optimal design group
December 2016

Nikolaos Pappas, Mercan Topkara, Miriam Redi, Brendan Jou, Tao Chen, Hongyi Liu, Shih-Fu Chang won the Best Multimodal Paper Award
at the Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval
with their paper Multilingual Visual Sentiment Concept Matching
Natural Language Processing group
June 2016

2015

Marzieh Razavi won the Best Paper Award
at the Language and Technology Conference
with her paper Pronunciation Lexicon Development for Under-Resourced Languages Using Automatically Derived Subword Units: A Case Study on Scottish Gaelic
Speech and audio processing group
November 2015

Christopher McCool, Roy Wallace, Mitchell McLaren, Laurent El Shafey, Sébastien Marcel won the Premium Best Paper Award
at the IET Biometrics
with their paper Session variability modelling for face authentication
Biometrics security & privacy group
September 2015

2014

Laurent El Shafey won the Best Biometrics Student Paper Award
at the International Joint Conference on Biometrics
with his paper Audio-visual gender recognition in uncontrolled environment using variability modeling techniques
Biometrics security & privacy group
October 2014

Laurent El Shafey won the European Biometrics Research Award
with his paper Scalable Probabilistic Models: Applied to Face Identification in the Wild
Biometrics security & privacy group
September 2014

2013

Vasil Khalidov, Florence Forbes and Radu Horaud won the Best paper Award
at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing
with their paper Alignment of Binocular-Binaural Data Using a Moving Audio-Visual Target
Perception and Activity Understanding
October 2013

Alexandre Heili and Jean-Marc Odobez won the Best Paper Award
for Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance
with their paper Parameter Estimation and Contextual Adaptation for a Multi-Object Tracking CRF Model
Perception and Activity Understanding
January 2013

2012

Dinesh Jayagopi, Dayra Sanchez-Cortes, Kazuhiro Otsuka, Junji Yamato, and Daniel Gatica-Perez won the Outstanding Paper Award
at the ACM Int. Conf. on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), Santa Monica, USA
with the paper entitled Linking Speaking and Looking Behavior Patterns with Group Composition, Perception, and Performance
Social Computing
October 2012

Kenneth Funes won the Student Best paper Award
at the CVPR workshop on Gesture Recognition
with his paper Gaze estimation from multimodal Kinect data
Perception and Activity Understanding
June 2012

2011

Trinh- Minh-Tri Do and Daniel Gatica-Perez won the Best paper Award
at the IEEE Int. Symp. on Wearable Computers (ISWC)
with the paper entitled GroupUs: Smartphone Proximity Data and Human Interaction Type Mining
Social Computing
June 2011

2010

Raul Montoliu and Daniel Gatica-Perez won the Best paper Award
at the Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia Conference (MUM)
with their paper entitled Discovering Human Places of Interest from Multimodal Mobile Phone Data
Social Computing
December 2010

Venkatesh Bala Subburaman and Sébastien Marcel won the Workshop Best paper Award
at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
with their paper Fast Bounding Box Estimation based Face Detection
Biometrics security & privacy group
September 2010

Norman Poh, Josef Kittler, Sébastien Marcel, Driss Matrouf and Jean-Francois Bonastre won the Best Paper Award
at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition
with their paper Model and Score Adaptation for Biometric Systems: Coping with Device Interoperability and Changing Acquisition Conditions
Biometrics security & privacy group
August 2010

2009

Stéphanie Lefèvre won the Best Student Paper Award
at the International Conference on Multimedia and Expo
with her paper Structure and appearance features for robust 3D facial actions tracking
Perception and Activity Understanding
June 2009