IfI News 2025
News list
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UZH joins Hugging Face’s Academia Hub
Giorgia Ramponi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics, brings her Reinforcement Learning courses to the one-year pilot of the Academia Hub.
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Dan Olteanu named 2025 ACM Distinguished Member
Great news: The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Prof. Dr. Dan Olteanu, who leads the Data Systems and Theory (DaST) group at IfI, a Distinguished Member in recognition of his contributions to data management theory and systems.
Congratulations!
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Dan Stokesberry Award for Burkhard Stiller
Prof. Dr. Burkhard Stiller has been awarded the “Dan Stokesberry Award” in May 2025 during the closing Ceremony of the IEEE/IFIP Network Operations and Management Symposium (NOMS 2025) (https://noms2025.ieee-noms.org/).
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Database Theory Test of Time Award
The International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT) presented the Test of Time Award 2026 to work co-authored by IfI professor Dan Olteanu. The award recognizes the paper «Declarative Probabilistic Programming with Datalog» by Vince Bárány, Balder ten Cate, Benny Kimelfeld, Dan Olteanu, Zografoula Vagena.
Congratulations!
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In the media: Blockchain – from hype to design
Claudio Tessone shares insights on how the future of blockchain and crypto will rely on economic design, education, and integration.
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SNSF Starting Grant for Giorgia Ramponi
Giorgia Ramponi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics since 2024, has received a Starting Grant for her project “Multi-agent learning from demonstrations and human feedback”. Congratulations!
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The impact of open access publishing
André Meyer reflects with UZH Bibliothek on the practical impact of archiving research articles on ZORA.
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EU HORIZON Grant for “CRYPTOACTION”
Claudio Tessone, as part of a consortium with 16 partners and 2 associated organizations, has received funding from EU HORIZON for the project “Combating CRYPTO-currency-Facilitated Crime and Terrorism with Interoperable, Trustworthy, AI Enhanced, Collaborative Tools, Improved Information Sharing, Operations and Training for LEAs”. Congratulations!
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Semester Award for Tarek Alakmeh
Tarek Alakmeh has been awarded a Semester Award for his outstanding Master’s Thesis “Decoding a Developer’s Mind: Multimodal Approaches to Code Comprehension” (Fall 2024). Congratulations!
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Pooja Rani appointed to Professorship in Mannheim
We are delighted to congratulate our IfI postdoc Pooja Rani on her next career step.
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Semester Award for Kevin Bründler
Kevin Bründler has been awarded a Semester Award for his outstanding Master’s Thesis “Exploring Text Mining Applications in Financial Negotiations; A Case Study on Synthetic Data”. Congratulations!
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AI in Focus: From trust to the future of work
Abraham Bernstein researches with both a technical and a social science approach to understand the interaction between humans and computers.
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Women in Informatics Network Zurich founded
The →Women in Informatics Network Zurich (WINZ) ACM-W Student Chapter was founded on 29 September 2025 at the Department of Informatics. This initiative is dedicated to advancing the role of women in computing and aims to foster greater awareness of women’s contributions across all areas of computer science, from design and development to management and application.
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Killer-Drohnen sollten jetzt schon verboten werden
In diesem Interview mit dem Tages-Anzeiger warnt Davide Scaramuzza, Leiter der Robotics and Perception Group am Institut für Informatik, vor den Gefahren autonomer Waffensystemen (Killer-Drohnen). Er fordert ein sofortiges Verbot von derartigen Systemen und verweist auf die Dringlichkeit internationaler Regulierungen. Gleichzeitig betont er, dass Drohnentechnologie auch positive Anwendungen hat, beispielsweise in Such- und Rettungssystemen.
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Giorgia Ramponi: Top 100+ Women in AI & Data – Switzerland 2025
Congratulations! Giorgia Ramponi, Assistant Professor at the Department of Informatics, has been named one of the Top 100+ Women in AI & Data – Switzerland 2025.
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In the media: "A picture says more than a thousand words"
With numbers and algorithms, Renato Pajarola creates impressive visualizations that reveal hidden patterns in data. His research shows how computer science can unlock new insights across disciplines.
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OCAM – Runner-up Best Paper Award at Eurographics Computer Graphics & Visual Computing Conference
Congratulations! The paper “OCAM: Occlusion-aware Completeness via Coverage Analysis with Monte Carlo Sampling”, authored by Lizeth Joseline Fuentes Perez, Luciano Arnaldo Romero Calla, Renato Pajarola, and Javier Turek, won the Runner-up Best Paper Award at Eurographics Computer Graphics and Visual Computing (CGVC) 2025 conference in Liverpool.
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Tülin Kaman: Verena Meyer Visiting Professor at the Department of Informatics (Fall 2025 – Spring 2026)
We warmly welcome Tülin Kaman, who will be offering her lectures at the Department of Informatics starting in the fall semester of 2025.
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TrailView – Best Paper Award at Web3D 2025
Congratulations! The paper "TrailView: An Interactive 3D Hike Planning Tool" by Julian A. Croci, Christian Skorski, Julius Rauscher, Renato Pajarola, and Alexandra Diehl, won the best paper award at the Web3D 2025 Conference in Siena.
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Promotion of Prof. Anikó Hannák
As of 1 September 2025, Prof. Anikó Hannák has taken up the position as associate professor of social computing at the Department of Informatics, following her service as an assistant professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich.
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UZH Innovation Grant awarded for GeoFoundation Startup Initiative
Congratulations to Kilian Sprenkamp, PhD student at the Information Management Research Group and DSI researcher. GeoFoundation has been selected for the UZH Innovation Grant.
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HEC Lausanne (UNIL), the University of Zurich (UZH) and UNHCR join forces to meet the needs of refugees
As soon as they arrive in a host country, refugees face urgent questions: how to access healthcare, get social assistance, enroll children in school, or understand administrative procedures. But how can we provide them with clear, rapid answers, without overburdening already strained systems? Where can digital technology make a real difference? And how do we ensure these tools respect privacy, safety, and dignity?
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Lena Jäger takes over dual Professorship
Lena Jäger, Head of Digital Linguistics at the Department of Computational Linguistics (CL), will continue to offer her lecture on Advanced Machine Learning in both the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics. Moreover, she will offer a more specialized seminar around the topic of AI and human cognition soon. Warmly welcome, Lena!
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SDG Impact Award 2025 for Maya Guido
Congratulations! Maya Guido was awarded the SDG Impact Award at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics’ graduation ceremony.
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SDG Impact Award 2025 for Dario Stähelin
Dario Stähelin was honored with the SDG Impact Award at the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics’ graduation ceremony. Congratulations!
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Adaptive political questionnaires for voting advice applications
In collaboration with Smartvote, Abraham Bernstein and his PhD student Fynn Bachmann have developed a new algorithm that improves the quality of voting advice.
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Best Paper Award for IVDA at EuroVA 2025
The paper “A Design Space for the Critical Validation of LLM-Generated Tabular Data” by Madhav Sachdeva, Christopher Narayanan, Marvin Wiedenkeller, Jana Sedlakova, and Jürgen Bernard has been honored by the Best Paper Award at EuroVA 2025 in Luxembourg.
EuroVA is the largest workshop at the EuroVis Conference, Europe’s largest conference for interactive visual data visualization, hosted by the Eurographics Association.
Congratulations to the IVDA team!
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ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award for Pavlina Wurzel Gonçalves, Pooja Rani and Alberto Bacchelli
Congratulations! The paper «Code Review Comprehension: Reviewing Strategies Seen Through Code Comprehension Theories» by Pavlína Wurzel Gonçalves, Pooja Rani, and Alberto Bacchelli and their co-authors from Greece and Canada won the Distinguished Paper Award at the International Conference on Program Comprehension 2025 (ICPC).
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Sven Seuken: new journey
Sven Seuken, Head of the Computation and Economics Research Group, leaves the Department of Informatics.
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New podcast episode: Flow instead of frustration
In this DIZH-podcast episode, André Meyer talks about how we get into flow – a state of deep concentration – and why it is so difficult to stay there.
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SIGMOD Research Awards for Project on Cardinality Estimation
A recent breakthrough on the longstanding problem of cardinality estimation in database systems brought the DaST team and collaborators two major awards in data management research.
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Alexandra Diehl becomes Associate Professor
We are delighted to congratulate our IfI postdoc Alexandra Diehl on her next career step.
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Best Paper Award (2nd Runner Up) for Aleksandra Garazha, Cédric Merz, Gerhard Schwabe and Liudmila Zavolokina at ICIS 2024
Congratulations! The paper «Resilience in Times of Crisis: Empowering Refugees with Self-Sovereign Identity» by Aleksandra Garazha, Cédric Merz, Gerhard Schwabe and Liudmila Zavolokina received the 2nd runner up for the best overall conference complete paper award at the International Conference on Information Systems 2024 in Bangkok.
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FAN Award for Stefania Ionescu
Stefania Ionescu receives one of this year’s FAN Awards for her dissertation «Society as a Stakeholder: Understanding the Societal Impact of Systems Allocating Visibility Algorithmically». Congratulations!
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UZH Mentoring Award for Anikó Hannák
Anikó Hannák receives one of this year’s UZH Mentoring Awards. Congratulations!
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Was können Roboter?
Davide Scaramuzza spricht darüber, warum uns humanoide Roboter so faszinieren und weshalb es noch eine Weile dauern wird, bis sie uns im Alltag unterstützen werden.
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Ivan De Oliveira Nunes becomes Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity
As of 1 February 2025, Ivan De Oliveira Nunes joins the Department of Informatics as tenure-track Assistant Professor of Cybersecurity. Warmly welcome, Ivan!
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Two-year project «FlowTeams» receives DIZH Founder Grant
André Meyer, in collaboration with Thomas Fritz, has received funding from the DIZH for their project «FlowTeams». Congratulations!