held during workshop LogiCS / UnRAVeL

As we have unfortunately not been able to hold an award ceremony for the winners of the Helmut Veith Stipend in the past few years due to COVID-19, the Vienna Center for Logic and Algorithms (VCLA) organized an official ceremony for the winners of 2019-2021 on November 4, 2022. The event took place at the Boecklsaal of TU Wien during a joint two-day workshop of the doctoral colleges LogiCS (TU Wien, TU Graz and JKU Linz) and UnRAVeL (RWTH Aachen).

Stefan Szeider, who had founded the VCLA together with his colleague Helmut Veith who tragically passed away in 2016, presented the VCLA and its activities to the students of the doctoral colleges. Subsequently, Kurt Matyas, Vice Rector for Academic Affairs at TU Wien, officially awarded the stipends to the winners of the past three years: Daniela Martinez Duarte from Colombia (2019), Anna Baghumyan from Armenia (2020) and Ana Vesic from Serbia (2021).

The Helmut Veith Stipend is awarded annually to exceptionally talented and motivated female students in the field of computer science who pursue (or plan to pursue) one of the master’s programs in Computer Science at TU Wien taught in English and have (or have the interest to develop) a solid mathematical and technical background in at least one of the areas in which Austrian scientist Helmut Veith worked. The stipend is co-financed by TU Wien and the Wolfgang Pauli Institute (WPI). The deadline for the current call has been extended to January 16, 2023!

Nikita Veith, Herta Veith, Daniela Martinez Duarte, Anna Prianichnikova, Ana Vesic and her father Ljutvija Durakovic, Kurt Matyas, Anna Baghumyan, Norbert Mauser (WPI)

Herta Veith with a picture of her son Helmut and the winners of the Helmut Veith Stipend

About the stipend winners:

Daniela Martinez Duarte holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electronic engineering from Javeriana University in Cali, Colombia. Daniela Martinez Duarte graduated in 2019 with an award for academic excellence recognizing her outstanding score at the Colombian State Examination of the Quality of Higher Education (Saber pro). In 2016, she received a scholarship by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for an exchange semester at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and for a subsequent internship. She participated and took the 4th place in the group competition for the generation of open-data-based solutions to “citizen security” challenges organized by the U.S. Agency for International Development. Having completed her bachelor studies, Daniela enrolled for the MSc program Logic and Computation at TU Wien.

Anna Baghumyan completed her Bachelor’s degree, for which she received an Akian scholarship, in Computer Science at the American University of Armenia. During internships, she gained experience as a web and android developer, and she enrolled for extracurricular classes such as online programming or data science. In addition, Anna Baghumayn participated in several study-related projects and case studies such as predicting employee churn, classifying song genres from audio data, correctly guessing the street signs for smart cars, or forecasting the weather using machine learning techniques. Since March 2021, she has been pursuing a Master’s degree in Data Science at TU Wien. Anna is interested in and has worked on projects in the fields of machine learning, deep learning, information visualization and natural language processing, and she wrote her bachelor thesis on speech emotion recognition.

Ana Vesic received her Bachelor’s degree in Software and Data Engineering in 2022 at Singidunum University in Belgrade, Serbia, where she was awarded the Singidunum University stipend twice, being active and organizing extracurricular activities and professional internships for fellow students. During her studies, she published numerous scientific publications and was involved in research in the field of AI and web-based applications. Besides working within her profession, Ana developed a career as a corporate photographer and pursued artistic endeavors, exhibiting paintings in group and independent exhibitions as well as artistic festivals. After finishing her bachelor studies, she decided to pursue her master studies in Media and Human-Centered Computing at TU Wien. Topics of interest besides AI are media and human robot interaction, and integration of those fields with AI.