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10 MSc Students of ELLIS unit Amsterdam Presented Thesis Projects Conducted Abroad

The MSc Honours Programme is a flagship programme of the ELLIS unit Amsterdam. The ELLIS unit Amsterdam believes that the MSc Honours programme can help retain young AI talents in the region by allowing them to connect with world-class AI researchers and organise research visits to their respective co-supervisors at ELLIS partner institutions outside of the Netherlands.

On October 10th 2024, the unit celebrated the achievements of the MSc Honours students by organizing the MSc Honours Showcase, which was followed by a graduation lunch. At the event, the ELLIS unit Amsterdam MSc Honours students shared briefly the impressive research works they conducted in the past one year, their ELLIS visit experiences, and the plans following their graduation. The event was attended by the ELLIS unit Amsterdam community, including the supervisors of the Honours Programme. After the presentations, the ELLIS unit Amsterdam Director, Prof. Dr. Cees Snoek, awarded the ELLIS unit Amsterdam certificates to the MSc Honours students who successfully finished their thesis projects cum laude. This year, 9 out of 12 MSc Honours students who graduated cum laude presented their Honours research with co-supervisions of ELLIS Members at two different institutions. The ELLIS unit Amsterdam expressed congratulations to all the graduated MSc Honours students and wished them all the best in their future endeavours!

The MSc Honours students who presented their excellent works at the event are:

o Oline Ranum
Thesis project title: 3D Awareness, Geometry & Linguistics in Neural Sign Language Representations
Supervisors:
– Dr. Erik Bekkers (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Prof. Dr. Coloma Ballester (ELLIS Member, University of Barcelona)
– Prof. Dr. Floris Roelofsen (University of Amsterdam)

o Jona Ruthardt
Thesis project title: Do Better Language Models Have Crisper Vision?
Supervisors:
– Dr. Gertjan Burghouts (ELLIS Member, Senior Researcher at TNO)
– Dr. Yuki Asano (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Prof. Dr. Serge Belongie (ELLIS Fellow, University of Copenhagen)

o Madhura Pawar
Thesis project title: Improving Centrality Fairness in Algorithmic Link-Recommendations
Supervisors:
– Dr. Fernando P. Santos (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Dr. Fariba Karimi (TU Graz)

o Luca Pantea
Thesis project title: Reinforcement Learning from Simulated Feedback: Optimizing Pandemic Response
Supervisors:
– MSc Rob Romijnders (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Dr. Yuki Asano (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Prof. Pascal Frossard (ELLIS Fellow, EPFL Lausanne)

o Walter Simonici
Thesis project title: Are all you need your nearest neighbors and their gradients?
Supervisors:
– Dr. Yuki Asano (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Dr. Andrei Bursuc (ELLIS Member, Deputy Scientific Director at valeo.ai)

o David Frühbuß
Thesis project title: Cancer Immunotherapy Design with Geometric Deep Learning
Supervisors:
– Dr. Erik Bekkers (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Prof. Dr. Li Xue (Radboud University)
– Prof. Dr Stefanie Jegelka (ELLIS Member, TUM München)

o Diego Garcia Cerdas
Thesis project title: Data-driven exploration of selectivity in the human visual cortex using diffusion models
Supervisors:
– Dr. Iris Groen (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Prof. Dr. Gemma Roig (ELLIS Member, Goethe University Frankfurt)
– Dr. Pascal Mettes (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– MSc Christina Sartzetaki (University of Amsterdam)

o Egoitz Gonzalez Manso
Thesis project title: SLAM Expert System for Learning Optimal Tracking Strategies
Supervisors:
– Dr. Martin R. Oswald (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Prof. Dr. Marc Pollefeys (ELLIS Member, ETH Zürich)

o Robin Sasse
Thesis project title: Hierarchical Auto-Vocabulary Segmentation
Supervisors:
– Dr. Martin Oswald (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Dr. Francis Engelmann (ELLIS Member, ETH Zurich)
– MSc Osman Ülger (University of Amsterdam)

o Avik Pal 
Thesis project title: Hyperbolic embedding of multiple hierarchies
Supervisors:
– Dr. Pascal Mettes (ELLIS Member, University of Amsterdam)
– Prof. Fabio Galasso (ELLIS Member, Sapienza University of Rome)

Marten Türk, Gerard Planella Fontanillas, and Valentinos Pariza also graduated cum laude but couldn’t participate at the event.