The 2019 competition for the ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award was highly competitive with 16 final nominees. A selection committee composed of members from ERCIM and Informatics Europe eventually awarded two outstanding young researchers in recognition of the outstanding scientific quality of their research and the impact on science and society they have already achieved in their short career: Ninon Burgos (CNRS) and András Gilyén (Caltech) with an honorary mention to Paris Carbone (RISE). The award will be presented at the European Computer Science Summit (ECSS) in Rome on Tuesday, 29 October 2019.
Ninon Burgos, nominated by Anne Canteaut (Inria) is a researcher in the ARAMIS Lab at the Brain and Spine Institute (ICM) of the French CNRS in Paris. She joined the ARAMIS Lab in 2017 when she was awarded a PRESTIGE Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (a European “Marie Sklodowska-Curie” fellowship programme). She completed her PhD in 2016 at University College London in the Centre for Medical Image Computing under the supervision of Sébastien Ourselin. In 2012 she obtained a MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Imperial College London and an Engineering degree from the French Graduate School in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (ENSEA). Her research currently focuses on the development of computational imaging tools to improve the understanding and diagnosis of dementia. The main focus of her PhD was the development of image synthesis algorithms for MR-based attenuation correction in hybrid PET/MR scanners, and for detecting pathological abnormalities in the reconstructed PET data. During her first postdoctoral position at UCL, she decided to tackle the problem of automatic MR-based radiotherapy treatment planning in the pelvic region by developing a new framework combining segmentation and image synthesis. Ninon has already received high recognition from the research community. She got more than ten invitations to give presentations at external meetings, received three travel awards to attend major international conferences, a prize for her oral presentation at the PSMR 2015 conference in Italy, and a prize for the best publication in the European Journal of Medical Physics “Physica Medica” in 2017.
András Gilyén, nominated by Ronald de Wolf (CWI and University of Amsterdam), is a researcher at Caltech (previously at CWI until June 2019). András graduated on May 29, 2019, at the University of Amsterdam with the distinction "cum laude". His thesis is about quantum algorithms, and more generally about the theoretical computer science (TCS) aspects of quantum computing, an interdisciplinary field combining physics, computer science, and mathematics. His thesis is based on a number of publications in the very best conferences: three papers in STOC and FOCS, which are the two most prestigious annual conferences in TCS, and are its analogues of Nature and Science; and one paper in SODA, which is the world's premier algorithms conference. The thesis develops a new framework for quantum algorithms, called "quantum singular value transformation". The work of András has already been quite influential in the field of quantum computing: other researchers have realized András's new framework is extremely versatile and powerful, and are seeking out his help to apply it to their own problems. He recently became a postdoctoral fellow at the world-famous California Institute of Technology (Caltech), working with Profs. John Preskill, Fernando Brandão, and Thomas Vidick. He has also been accepted to participate in the very selective program on quantum computing in Spring 2020 at the Simons Institute in Berkeley.
2019 Cor Baayen Award
Winners (ex aequo):
Ninon Burgos (CNRS), nominated by Inria
András Gilyén (Caltech), nominated by CWI
Honorary mention:
Paris Carbone (RISE), nominated by RISE-SICS
Finalists:
Mário Antunes (IT Aveiro), nominated by INESC-ID
Constantinos Costa (University of Pittsburgh), nominated by the University of Cyprus
Pavlos Fafalios (FORTH-ICS), nominated by FORTH-ICS
Riccardo Guidotti (ISTI-CNR), nominated by ISTI-CNR
Lucca Hirschi (Inria), nominated by Inria
Csaba Kerepesi (SZTAKI), nominated by SZTAKI
Sebastian Lapuschkin (Fraunhofer HHI), nominated by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
Elena Mocanu (University of Twente), nominated by CWI
Panagiotis Papadopoulos (Brave Software Inc.), nominated by FORTH-ICS
Theofanis Raptis (IIT-CNR), nominated by IIT-CNR
Christof Weiß (University Erlangen-Nürnberg), nominated by Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
Naomi Woods (University Of Jyväskylä), nominated by VTT
Marcin Wrochna (University of Oxford) nominated by the University of Warsaw