ETH Medal for doctoral theses
Manuela Fischer, Maciej Besta and Francesco Locatello, three doctoral students from the Department of Computer Science, have won the ETH Medal for their outstanding doctoral theses.
Outstanding Master’s and doctoral theses are honoured with the Silver Medal of ETH Zurich and a financial sum. The prize will be awarded at the doctoral awards ceremony.
Manuela Fischer | ETH Medal
Thesis: Local Algorithms for Classic Graph Problems
Supervisor: Prof. Mohsen Ghaffari
Manuela Fischer is a postdoctoral researcher at Reykjavík University. Prior to that, she was a doctoral student at the Institute of Theoretical Computer Science at ETH Zürich, where her research was supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. During her doctorate, she did two research internships, one at Google NYC and one at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
Maciej Besta | ETH Medal
Thesis: Enabling High-Performance Large-Scale Irregular Computations
Supervisor: Prof. Torsten Hoefler
Maciej Besta is part of the Scalable Parallel Computing Lab (SPCL) at ETH Zurich. His interests focus on understanding and accelerating large-scale irregular computations in any types of settings and workloads. Besta received an ACM-IEEE CS HPC Fellowship and a Google PhD Fellowship in Parallel Computing. He was also honoured with various best paper awards, such as the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Best Student Paper Award, amongst others.
Francesco Locatello | ETH Medal
Thesis: Enforcing and Discovering Structure in Machine Learning
Supervisor: Prof. Gunnar Rätsch
Francesco Locatello is a Senior Applied Scientist at Amazon AWS where he leads the Causal Representation Learning team. He was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck ETH Center for Learning Systems, ELLIS, and received the Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning 2019. He also received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference of Machine Learning (ICML) 2019.