2010 SIGMM Best PhD thesis award

The 2010 winner of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications is Effrosyni Kokiopoulou (http://www.math.ethz.ch/~kokiopoe/). Dr. Kokiopoulou receives the award for her thesis - Geometry-Aware Analysis of High-Dimensional Visual Information Sets ? that she has done at the Signal Processing Laboratory (LTS4), Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland. Dr. Kokiopoulou is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the Seminar for Applied Mathematics at ETH Zurich.

The ACM SIGMM Outstanding PhD Thesis award, given in recognition of outstanding contributions in the researcher’s PhD thesis, cited Dr. Kokiopoulou’s results in “formulating novel geometric-aware techniques and associated analysis for high dimensional data”. Her work addresses “important issues related to classification, namely flexible data representations for joint coding and classification, robust classification in the case of large geometric transformations and classifications with multiple object observations”. The novelty of the work lies in the proposed solutions for semantic approximation and transformation invariance. These fundamental solutions can improve the efficiency and robustness of classification across multimedia sensor networks, in both centralized and distributed settings.

The SIGMM award will be presented at the ACM International Conference on Multimedia 2010 that will be held October 25-20 in Florence, Italy.

ACM is the professional society of computer scientists, and SIGMM is the special interest group on multimedia.