The ELLIS PhD Award 2024 recognizes three young scientists from universities in Lausanne, London & Tübingen
This year’s ELLIS PhD Award goes to three young exceptional machine learning researchers from universities in Switzerland, England, and Germany: Anastasiia Koloskova from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Luigi Gresele from the University of Tübingen and Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems won the main prize, and Jonathan Richard Schwarz from the University College London was the runner up.
Each of the three receive prize money for their outstanding dissertations in the field of modern AI. The award is sponsored by the Kühborth Stiftung GmbH and recognizes outstanding PhD students and their research achievements.
This year the competition among nominees was particularly strong so a runner up was selected along with the two winners. Among the nominees, the work of Anastasiia Koloskova, Luigi Gresele and Jonathan Richard Schwarz stood out in particular.
Anastasiia Koloskova
Dr. Koloskova recently completed her PhD at EPFL under the supervision of Professor Martin Jaggi, where her research focused on developing novel algorithms and techniques for privacy-preserving and distributed machine learning. Her work has been recognized with prestigious awards, including EPFL’s Doctoral Program Thesis Distinction award and a Google PhD Fellowship in Machine Learning. Prior to her PhD, she earned a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Dr. Koloskova has gained valuable industry experience through internships at Google and Facebook, where she contributed to cutting-edge research in federated learning.
Her research focuses on enhancing the efficiency, scalability, and theoretical foundations of decentralized, distributed, and collaborative learning methods. Her thesis contributed to optimization theory by introducing novel proof techniques and advancing practical applications.
“I am truly honored to receive the ELLIS PhD Award. I am deeply grateful to my PhD advisors Martin Jaggi and Sebastian Stich for providing me with all the support and guidance, which made this achievement possible,” says the current Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University.
Learn more about Anastasiia Koloskova
Luigi Gresele
Dr. Gresele’s research lies at the intersection of machine learning and causality, with a focus on identifiability in representation learning and causal inference. He completed his Ph.D. (summa cum laude) at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and the University of Tübingen, under the supervision of Bernhard Schölkopf. During his doctoral studies, he took part in an ELLIS exchange with the Parietal team at Inria-CEA, hosted by Bertrand Thirion and Aapo Hyvärinen, and worked with Dominik Janzing at Amazon Research. Before his Ph.D., Dr. Gresele earned a master’s degree in Physics of Complex Systems from Politecnico di Torino and Université Paris-Sud (now Paris-Saclay).
His dissertation studied identifiable representation learning in two settings: under the independent influences assumption and with the availability of multi-view data. It introduced novel identifiability results, efficient estimation methods, and demonstrated an application of multi-view representation learning to neuroimaging data.
“I feel incredibly honored. I am grateful for the opportunity to collaborate with and learn from outstanding researchers across many European institutions, whose unique expertise and ideas shaped different aspects of my thesis. The award is a wonderful recognition of the process of bringing these insights together and synthesizing them,” says the current postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen.
Learn more about Luigi Gresele
Jonathan Richard Schwarz
Dr. Schwarz completed his PhD in a joint program between UCL and DeepMind, where his research focused on the intersection of these two fields. Prior to his academic pursuits, he gained significant industry experience as a Senior Research Scientist at DeepMind. Following his PhD, he held positions as a Research Fellow at Harvard University and co-founded Safe Sign Technologies, a startup later acquired by Thomson Reuters. Currently, Dr. Schwarz serves as the Head of AI Research at Thomson Reuters, leading cutting-edge research initiatives to drive innovation in the field of artificial intelligence.
His PhD focused on how the rich family of sparse parameterizations relate to and enables powerful efficiency gains in large-scale systems. He shows how these principles are applicable to a broad range of problems in Machine Learning, covering Generative Models, Continual Learning Gaussian Processes, Language Modelling and Neural Data Compression.
“Being the first person in my family to attend university (let alone get a PhD), and often feeling pitched against the odds, I feel incredibly honoured to conclude the journey with such a wonderful and humbling recognition. My PhD came with the unique demands of balancing a full-time job and a global pandemic, which made it yet more challenging,” says Dr. Schwarz.
Learn more about Jonathan Richard Schwarz
About the ELLIS PhD Award
Any European dissertation in the area of artificial intelligence and machine learning-related fields (including computer vision and robotics) can be nominated for the annual award. The dissertation is then reviewed by a committee of renowned scientists for technical depth, the significance of the research contribution and the potential impact on theory and practice.
“It is amazing to see how many strong PhDs are defended every year in Europe. It is a great pleasure and honor to be part of the selection process of the ELLIS PhD Award. I sincerely congratulate all three winners. Given that we had so many strong submissions, we decided, for the first time, to also give a third prize (Runner Up) this year”, says Bernt Schiele, chair of the selection process for the ELLIS PhD Award.
Learn more about the award and the nomination process. The next nomination deadline is on April 15, 2025. For questions, please send an email to phd-award@ellis.eu.
About the Kühborth Stiftung GmbH
Kühborth Stiftung GmbH is a foundation established by Dr. Dipl.-Ing. Wolfgang Kühborth and his wife Helga Kühborth to promote research and teaching in the fields of natural, technical and economic sciences. By sponsoring the ELLIS PhD Award, the Kühborth Stiftung aims to support advances in artificial intelligence, to promote academic excellence, and to propagate the European idea.