The ERCIM Evaluation Committee for the Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award unanimously selected Fabio Carrara from ISTI-CNR as the winner for 2022. An honorary mention was given to Cédric Colas from Inria.
Fabio Carrara is currently employed at the Information Science and Technologies Institute, National Research Council (ISTI-CNR). He obtained his PhD in 2019 from the University of Pisa, Italy. The title of his thesis is "Deep Learning for Image Classification and Retrieval: Analysis and Solutions to Current Limitations". The work was supervised by Prof. Giuseppe Amato, Prof. Claudio Gennaro, and Prof. Francesco Marcelloni.
Fabio's research focuses mainly on deep learning for multimedia understanding, representation, and retrieval. Over the years, he has contributed to these areas of research from a theoretical and an applied perspective.
His professional experience encompasses collaborations with national and international institutions, such as the Masaryk University (Czech Republic), Scuola Normale Superiore (Italy), Institute for Systems and Robotics (Portugal), and several Italian CNR institutes (IN-CNR, ILC-CNR, IIT-CNR). Fabio has been involved in several European and Italian research projects (e.g., AI4Media, CNR4C-AIMAP, ADA, Smart News).
He has published more than 40 papers in international journals (e.g., Medical Image Analysis, IEEE TIP, Computer Vision and Image Understanding, Information Systems, Information Processing & Management, MTAP, ESWA) and conferences in the areas of deep learning, computer vision, and multimedia information retrieval. He is an active member of the scientific community, and he has a good track record as a reviewer of international conferences and journals.
In 2018 he won the ISTI Young Research Award for best young (under 32 years) researcher.
Fabio's research activity stands out for its quality and interdisciplinarity. Worthy of note is his work on adversarial attack detection, proposing solutions based on the analysis of the features extracted by the various layers of deep neural networks. He also researched the application of appropriately simplified deep neural networks on resource-constrained devices, such as smart cameras. His research results are not only theoretical but also have significant application and technology transfer implications, as for example, the miniaturised models for parking occupancy detection (http://cnrpark.it/).
Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award 2022
Winner:
- Fabio Carrara (Information Science and Technologies Institute, National Research Council (ISTI-CNR)), nominated by Giuseppe Amato (CNR)
Honorary mention:
- Cédric Colas (Inria), nominated by Pierre-Yves Oudeyer (Inria)
Finalists:
- Simon Bibri, nominated by John Krogstie (NTNU);
- Gabrielle De Micheli (University of California, San Diego), nominated by Jean-Frédéric Gerbeau (Inria)
- Joao Gante (Hugging Face), nominated by Leonel Sousa (INESC)
- Toni Heittola (Tampere University), nominated by Katja Ojakangas (VTT)
- Johannes Mueller-Roemer (Fraunhofer IGD), nominated by Arjan Kuijper (Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft)
- Antonis Papaioannou (ICS-FORTH), nominated by Dimitris Plexousakis (ICS-FORTH)
- Shazia Tabassum (INESC TEC), nominated by João Gama (INESC TEC).
Evaluation Committee:
The Evaluation Committee constituents were Monica Divitini (NTNU – chair of the ERCIM Human Capital Task Group), Krzysztof Apt (CWI), Gabriel David (INESC), Georgia Kapitsaki (University of Cyprus), Thierry Priol (Inria), Fabrizio Sebastiani (ISTI-CNR), Jerzy Tiuryn (University of Warsaw). The decision was unanimous.
More information about the ERCIM Cor Baayen Young Researcher Award:
https://www.ercim.eu/human-capital/cor-baayen-award