ELLIS PhD Award 2021

The annual ELLIS PhD Awards are sponsored by the Kühborth Stiftung GmbH and have been established to recognize and encourage outstanding research achievements during the dissertation phase of outstanding students working in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning including related fields such as computer vision and robotics.

From a set of very strong nominations, an international committee of renowned experts chose the following scholars as ELLIS PhD Award winners:

• Thomas Kipf (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands)

•  Arsha Nagrani (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)

Thomas Kipf (University of Amsterdam, Netherlands) 

Deep Learning with Graph-Structured Representations

Thomas Kipf's dissertation pioneered algorithms and neural architectures for learning with structured data in the form of networks or graphs, and for modeling interacting dynamical systems using graph-structured representations. In particular, his thesis has introduced influential graph neural network models, such as the graph convolutional network and the graph auto-encoder, which have found widespread application in areas such as drug discovery and (social) network analysis.

Arsha Nagrani (University of Oxford, United Kingdom)

Video Understanding using Multimodal Deep Learning

Arsha Nagrani's dissertation introduces multiple creative ways to use multi-modal data in machine learning. It explores cross-modal and self-supervised learning for important applications such as speaker recognition, action recognition, and text-to-video retrieval. It also contributes a data generation framework that has resulted in several large-scale audio-visual datasets. Both the scientific outcomes of the thesis and the datasets released have had a high impact in terms of citations and downloads.