IC Faculty Awards 2018
Awards were given in the domains of outreach, research and teaching. (© 2019 Viktor Kuncak/EPFL)
In December, students and staff in the EPFL School of Computer and Communication Sciences (IC) were rewarded for their outstanding contributions over the past year.
Awards were given to honor excellence in the domains of outreach, research and teaching.
In the category of outreach, IC Dean Jim Larus presented staff awards to IC Head of Infrastructures Jean-Luc Benz, who is also the Exchange Coordinator for IC students; Barbara Jobstmann, who ran a summer program aimed at getting school-age girls involved in computer science; and Lê Nguyen Hoang, whose ZettaBytes YouTube channel is devoted to computer science concepts and discussions with IC researchers.
IC Professor Pierre Dillenbourg then presented Ashkan Norouzi Fard with the 2018 Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize for his outstanding thesis, “Algorithms for Clustering Problems: Theoretical Guarantees and Empirical Evaluations”. The Patrick Denantes Memorial Prize honors the memory of an IC doctoral student who passed away in 2009.
In the category of research, Professor Matthias Grossglauser presented five EDIC Thesis Distinctions to doctoral students, including Ashkan. The other four winners were Alexandros Daglis for his thesis, “Network-Computer Co-Design for Distributed In-Memory Computing”; Ravichandhran Kandhadai Madhavan for “Algorithmic Resource Verification”; Lucas Maystre for “Efficient Learning from Comparisons”; and Amir Shaikhha for “Compilation and Code Optimization for Data Analytics”.
Professor Grossglauser also announced Frederike Dümbgen and Amir Shaikhha as winners of Distinguished Service Awards.
Finally, Professor Rüdiger Urbanke presented 12 awards to IC teaching assistants: Mauro Fanciulli, Louis Faucon, Stella Giannakopoulou, Kristina Gligoric, Stian Haklev, Novak Kaluderovic, Clément Luneau, Lazar Milenkovic, Jennifer Olsen, Francesca Paola Nicoletti, Mirjana Pavlovic, and Arash Pourhabibi.
A few of the winning TAs even shared some of their best teaching advice.
“For me, it’s really about trying to make the students participate and feel like a knowledge community, because now the information is not just coming from the teacher – it’s all around the world,” said Stian Haklev. “We want to help students not just memorize the knowledge but organize it, so we can help them become lifelong learners”.