A mind broadening opportunity for promising young scientists

During two summer months, the students would work within various research groups at the ETH Computer Science Department, gaining hands-on research experience in their areas of choice. The fellowship is organized and endowed by the Huber-Kudlich Foundation, the ETH rectorate and the CS Department. This novel program serves the overarching purpose of identifying and advancing promising young scientists.

Intelligence, thirst for knowledge and tenacity

A key challenge in choosing the fellows was the large number of excellent applicants. The selection team had to look very closely at the most suitable application profiles. Becoming a successful future research leader takes more than intelligence and excellent grades. It also requires passion for knowledge, the drive to tackle tough problems, and the desire to contribute to society.

One applicant with those traits was Ali Mottaghi. He and his team scored fifth place at the 2017 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing for their solution OBTAIN, an algorithm for the real-time beat tracking of audio signals. “While programming our algorithm we sometimes got stuck and it seemed that our problems were simply unsolvable. But one of us always had an idea that enabled us to move forward,” recounts the Iranian student. Currently, the focal point of Ali’s research is submodular function optimization, the topic of his Bachelor’s thesis. While learning about the SSRF, he discovered the Learning- and Adaptive Systems Group, led by Prof. Krause. The young scientist realized that Prof. Krause had published cutting-edge research in exactly that area. Ali set his mind on learning more about that research, started watching tutorials and organized personal chats with two members of Prof. Krause’s group.

“I am deeply interested in machine learning algorithms and their power to make seemingly complex problems simple”, writes Katherine Bancroft from Canada in her motivation letter. The computer engineering student intends to gain practical research experience in data analytics and machine learning. Moreover, she wants to learn about “the mechanics of the world of research.” Her long-term goal is to use the predictive power of data analysis to increase our standards of living. Katherine is particularly eager to find solutions that require the combined application of both mathematical and technical knowledge.

Research with breadth and depth

While all fifteen fellows share a similar admission profile, their ideas and opinions differ on how the results of today’s computer science research can best serve society.

Amala Deshmukh from India is invested in human computer interaction (Prof. Hilliges). “One of my ultimate goals it to train a robotic hand to make manlike gestures and to interact naturally with a human hand”, she explains. Further, Amala is interested in the use of computer vision to build robust and intelligent systems for self-driving cars.

Discontent with the human experience “being limited by time and space,” our fellow from China, Wei Dong, built several virtual reality and augmented reality applications on mobile devices and has been following the development of these fields actively. In a cooperation of his lab and the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, he has developed a virtual reality 3D map demo that enables natural gesture interactions in virtual space. Wei’s current project is to refine the texture on 3D models to give humans a more realistic experience when plunging into a virtual or mixed reality.

Self-driving cars, online-banking, 3D printing and personalized health files: Olga Obrenovic is fascinated by the yet unseen potential made possible by big data. However, the Serbian student observes that “the expansion of data as well as our dependence on data cause a growing need for reliable information security software.” In an environment that encourages her to “develop extraordinary solutions,” Olga intends to help increase the global level of information security.

With their diverse visions for the future, Amala, Wei and Olga demonstrate the wide range of research interests that SSR fellows bring to the CS Department.

Fostering tomorrow’s academic leaders

Graduate school and research are very different from the undergraduate experience. By immersing students in the department’s research groups, our summer program gives students an early first encounter with a potential future research environment. The digital revolution is an on-going, global process that opens up exciting new opportunities for researchers but also presents novel challenges for society that need to be addressed. This is why ETH decided to introduce the summer fellowship program: to foster young students who may become future leaders in computer science. And certainly we would be happy to welcome some of our research fellows again later on in their career.