Awards
Capturing Idiap's excellence, our researchers receive numerous international awards.
List of Awards
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st Place – IJCB 2026 V-MAD Competition (Simple Scenario) | A. H. Khan, Y. Dayer, H. O. Shahreza, A. Komaty, S. Marcel | Paper : Building A Civic Tool for Community-Police Engagement to Adapt Neighborhood Policing | September 2026 |
| Best Paper Award, ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS) 2026 | R. Annapureddy, S. Šeiko, N. Higham-James, W. Droz, A. Fornaroli, S. Vollmer, B. E. Hecking, D. Gatica-Perez | Paper : Building A Civic Tool for Community-Police Engagement to Adapt Neighborhood Policing | June 2026 |
| Best Presentation Award, the 7th Int. Workshop on Eye and Gaze in Computer Vision in conjunction with CVPR 2026 | A. Gupta, Y. Qian, R. Gao, I. Ananthabhotla, J.-M. Odobez, V. K. Ithapu, C. Murdock | Paper: Learning Ego-Exo Visual Representations for Conversational Gaze Estimation | June 2026 |
| Nomination for the EPHJ Exhibitors' Grand Prize – The World of High Precision, the leading international trade show dedicated to high-precision technologies in the watchmaking, jewelry, microtechnology, and medtech industries. | CIPOSA SA, Jean Singer & Cie SA, Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH), Idiap Research Institute (Guillaume Clivaz & Sylvain Calinon) | Smart Dispensing technology: enables the transfer of expert operators' precise manual skills and automatically reproduces them with exceptional accuracy using artificial intelligence. | June 2026 |
| Paper of the Season Award, the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR) | Y. Li, Q. Jiacheng, S. Calinon | Paper: A Riemannian Take on Distance Fields and Geodesic Flows in Robotics | June 2026 |
| Winners of the DISPLACE-M challenge | S. Baroudi, Y. Labrak, S. Kumar, J. Kalda, S. Burdisso, P. Cyrta, J. Ignacio Alvarez-Trejos, P. Motlicek, H. Bredin, R. Marxer | Doctor or Patient? Synergizing Diarization and ASR for Code-Switched Hinglish Medical Conditions Extraction | March 2026 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Resource Paper Award, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) 2025, Suzhou, China | L. Zhang, M. Valentino, and A. Freitas | Autoformalization in the Wild: Assessing LLMs on Real-World Mathematical Definitions | November 2025 |
| EPFL EDEE Thesis Distinction | A. Gupta | Unified and Multimodal Learning for Gaze Prediction in Naturalistic Settings | November 2025 |
| Outstanding Paper Award, Workshop "The Art of Robustness: Surviving Failures in Robotics" of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2025, Hangzhou, China | A. Razmjoo, S. Calinon, M. Gienger, and F. Zhang | CCDP: Model-free Failure Recovery via guided Diffusion Sampling | October 2025 |
| Best Poster Award, Workshop "Bimanual Manipulation: Advancing Human-Humanoid Interaction and Collaboration" of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2025, Hangzhou, China | Z. Li, J. Liu, D. Li, T. Teng, M. Li, S. Calinon, D. Caldwell, and F. Chen | ManiDP: Manipulability-Aware Diffusion Policy for Posture-Dependent Bimanual Manipulation | October 2025 |
| Best Doctoral Dissertation Award, IEEE Biometrics Council | H. Otroshi Shahreza | On the Information in Deep Biometric Templates: from Vulnerability of Unprotected Templates to Leakage in Protected Templates | September 2025 |
| Best Paper Award, International Conference on Communities and Technologies (C&T), Siegen, Germany | R. Annapureddy, A. Fornaroli, M. Fattori, V. Lacovara, E. Fiori, S. Vollmer, M. Konradi, B. E. Hecking, G. Todesco, and D. Gatica-Perez | Co-Designing with Multiple Stakeholders and Datasets: A Community-Centered Process to Understand Youth Deviance in the Italian City of Turin | July 2025 |
| Best Paper Award, Workshop on Speech and Audio-Language Models (ICASSP) | S. Kumar, I. Thorbecke, S. Burdisso, E. Villatoro-Tello, M. K. E, K. Hacioğlu, P. Rangappa, P. Motlicek, A. Ganapathiraju, A. Stolcke | Performance evaluation of SLAM-ASR: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the way forward | April 2025 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outstanding Contribution Award, International Workshop on Federated Foundation Models (NeurIPS 2024) | W. Lu, H. Yu, J. Wang, D. Teney, H. Wang, Y. Chen, Q. Yang, X. Xie, X. Ji | ZooPFL: Exploring Black-Box Foundation Models for Personalized Federated Learning | December 2024 |
| EPFL Digital Humanities Section Teacher Award | Daniel Gatica-Perez | December 2024 | |
| IEEE Fellow | Sébastien Marcel | December 2024 | |
| Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR) | Sébastien Marcel | November 2024 | |
| Outstanding Paper Award at EMNLP | X. Quan, M. Valentino, L. A. Dennis, A. Freitas | Verification and Refinement of Natural Language Explanations through LLM-Symbolic Theorem Proving | November 2024 |
| EPFL Faulhaber Prize – Thesis Award | Alice Guntli | Planning with optimal control: Application to robot manipulation with a mobile bimanual platform | October 2024 |
| EPFL STI Teaching Assistant Award | Darya Baranouskaya | October 2024 | |
| EPFL STI Teaching Assistant Award | Olena Hrynenko | October 2024 | |
| EDEE PhD Thesis Distinction Award at EPFL | Lakmal Meegahapola | Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life | October 2024 |
| Outstanding Best Paper Award Finalist, Robotics: Science and Systems 2024 | Y. Li, X. Chi, A. Razmjoo and S. Calinon | Configuration Space Distance Fields for Manipulation Planning | July 2024 |
| Best Paper Award (two tied-up winners) from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) Technical Committee on Model-based Optimization for Robotics, for articles accepted/published in 2023 | S. Shetty, T. Lembono, T. Löw and S. Calinon | Tensor Train for Global Optimization Problems in Robotics | June 2024 |
| Best Paper Award, 6th International Workshop on Gaze Estimation and Prediction in the Wild (GAZE 2024) at CVPR 2024 | Anshul Gupta, Pierre Vuillecard, Arya Farkhondeh, Jean-Marc Odobez | Exploring the Zero-Shot Capabilities of Vision-Language Models for Improving Gaze Following | June 2024 |
| Special Recognition for Sustainable Practices at the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) | Aurel Maeder, Lakmal Meegahapola, and Daniel Gatica-Perez | Learning about Social Context from Smartphone Data: Generalization Across Countries and Daily Life Moments | May 2024 |
| Best Student Paper Award at the 18th International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition | Anshul Gupta, Samy Tafasca, Naravich Chutisilp and Jean-Marc Odobez | A Unified Model for Gaze Following and Social Gaze Prediction | May 2024 |
| 3rd place in the AI Safety Prize at Swiss Cyber Security Days, for their work on 3D face reconstruction from deep facial embeddings | Hatef Otroshi Shahreza and Sébastien Marcel | GaFaR: Geometry-aware Face Reconstruction | February 2024 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Winner of the NeurIPS 2023 Robot Air Hockey Challenge | AiRLIHockey Team, with J. Jankowski, A. Marić and S. Calinon | December 2023 | |
| Honourable Mentions from the Pour Demain think tank that organizes the AI Safety Prize, for their ideas about vulnerabilities of face recognition systems | Hatef Otroshi Shahreza and Sébastien Marcel | December 2023 | |
| Finalist of the Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Student Award at the ACM Ubicomp/ISWC conference | Lakmal Meegahapola | October 2023 | |
| IMWUT Distinguished Paper Award by the journal Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies | Lakmal Meegahapola, William Droz, and Daniel Gatica-Perez | Generalization and Personalization of Mobile Sensing-Based Mood Inference Models: An Analysis of College Students in Eight Countries | October 2023 |
| EAB Research Award 2023 from the European Association for Biometrics, for his significant contribution to the field of biometrics research and innovations in Europe | Hatef Otroshi | September 2023 | |
| Best Poster Award at the IJCB 2023 IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics | Pavel Korshunov, Haolin Chen, Philip N. Garner, and Sébastien Marcel | Vulnerability of Automatic Identity Recognition to Audio-Visual Deepfakes | September 2023 |
| Ranked first in the "Compact Models" track of the "Efficient Face Recognition Competition" at the IJCB 2023 IEEE International Joint Conference on Biometrics | Idiap's Biometrics Security and Privacy group | EFaR 2023: Efficient Face Recognition Competition | September 2023 |
| ISCA Award for the Best Paper published in Speech Communication (2018–2022) at the Interspeech 2023 conference | Mathew Magimai-Doss, Dimitri Palaz, Ronan Collobert | End-to-End Acoustic Modeling using Convolutional Neural Networks for HMM-based Automatic Speech Recognition | August 2023 |
| Honorable Mention Award at the IMX '23 conference | Haeeun Kim and Daniel Gatica-Perez | Referencing in YouTube Knowledge Communication Videos | August 2023 |
| Outstanding Reviewer Recognition at the International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) | Ina Kodrasi | June 2023 | |
| Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) | Hervé Bourlard | January 2023 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 stars of Europe 2022 award from the Minister of Higher Education and Research, for their European H2020 MEMMO project | Sylvain Calinon and his colleagues from CNRS | December 2022 | |
| Best Doctoral Thesis Award in Electrical Engineering from EPFL | Angelos Katharopoulos | Stop Wasting my FLOPS: Improving the Efficiency of Deep Learning Models | November 2022 |
| ACM ICMI Sustained Accomplishment Award 2022 at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction in Bengaluru, India | Daniel Gatica-Perez | November 2022 | |
| Ten-Year Impact Award in Ubiquitous Computing at the ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) | Daniel Gatica-Perez and his colleagues | StressSense: Detecting Stress in Unconstrained Acoustic Environments using Smartphones | September 2022 |
| IEEE RAS Most Active Technical Committee Award | Sylvain Calinon, Adrien Escande, Yue Hu, and Patrick Wensing | August 2022 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best PhD Award at EUSIPCO 2020 | Ina Kodrasi | January 2021 | |
| Best Poster Award during the Workshop "Towards Curious Robots: Modern Approaches for Intrinsically-Motivated Intelligent Behavior" at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021) | Thibaut Kulak | Intrinsically-Motivated Robot Learning of Bayesian Probabilistic Movement Primitives | June 2021 |
| IEEE James L. Flanagan Award — awarded for the first time to a Swiss researcher, jointly with Prof. Nelson Morgan (Berkeley University, USA) | Hervé Bourlard | July 2021 | |
| EPFL Electrical Engineering Doctoral Program PhD Thesis Distinction | Weipeng He | Deep learning approaches for auditory perception in robotics | January 2021 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nominated Exemplary Reviewer by the IEEE Wireless Communications Letters journal | Lakmal Meegahapola | January 2020 | |
| 10-year Impact Award at the 19th International Conference on Ubiquitous and Mobile Multimedia (MUM) 2020 — Social Computing group | Trinh-Minh-Tri Do and Daniel Gatica-Perez | By their apps you shall understand them: mining large-scale patterns of mobile phone usage | November 2020 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Award for outstanding publications in information technology from ITG 2019 | Ina Kodrasi and Simon Doclo | Analysis of Eigenvalue Decomposition-Based Late Reverberation Power Spectral Density Estimation | November 2019 |
| Best Presentation Award at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) — Robot learning & interaction group | Noémie Jaquier | Bayesian Optimization Meets Riemannian Manifolds in Robot Learning | November 2019 |
| Research Award from the European Association for Biometrics — Biometrics security & privacy group | Tiago de Freitas Pereira | Learning How To Recognize Faces in Heterogeneous Environments | September 2019 |
| Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) — Biometrics security & privacy group | Pavel Korshunov | Tampered Speaker Inconsistency Detection with Phonetically Aware Audio-visual Features | June 2019 |
| Honorable Mention Paper Award at the International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare — Social computing group | Thanh-Trung Phan, Skanda Muralidhar, Daniel Gatica-Perez | #Drink Or #Drunk: Multimodal Signals and Drinking Practices on Instagram | May 2019 |
| Best Paper Award from the International Association for Pattern Recognition — Biometrics security & privacy group | Raghavendra Ramachandra, Sushma Venkatesh, Kiran Raja, Sushil Bhattacharjee, Pankaj S. Wasnik, Sébastien Marcel, Christoph Busch | Custom Silicon Face Masks: Vulnerability on Commercial Face Recognition Systems & Presentation Attack Detection | May 2019 |
| Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging — Computational bioimaging group | Christian Jaques | Multi-Spectral Widefield Microscopy of the Beating Heart through Post-Acquisition Synchronization and Unmixing | April 2019 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Student Paper Award at the IEEE International Conference on Image Processing — Computational bioimaging group | Adrian Shajkofci | Semi-Blind Spatially-Variant Deconvolution in Optical Microscopy with Local Point Spread Function Estimation by Use of Convolutional Neural Networks | October 2018 |
| Outstanding Reviewer at the International Conference on Machine Learning — Uncertainty quantification and optimal design group | David Ginsbourger | July 2018 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing — Natural Language Processing group | Nikolaos Pappas, Andrei Popescu-Belis | Multilingual Hierarchical Attention Networks for Document Classification | December 2017 |
| Community Service Award at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction — Social computing group | Daniel Gatica-Perez | November 2017 | |
| Best Paper Award of the Intelligent Service Robotics (ISR) journal — Robot learning and interaction group | Sylvain Calinon | A Tutorial on Task-Parameterized Movement Learning and Retrieval | June 2017 |
| Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics — Machine learning group | James Newling, Francois Fleuret | A Sub-Quadratic Exact Medoid Algorithm | April 2017 |
| Ganesh N. Ramaswamy Memorial Student Grant from the IEEE — Speech and audio processing group | Subhadeep Dey | Exploiting Sequence Information for Text-Dependent Speaker Verification | March 2017 |
| Best Associate Editor Award from the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology | Jean-Marc Odobez | January 2017 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| C. Moser Award for outstanding Ph.D. or M.Sc. theses, Institute of Mathematical Statistics and Actuarial Science of the University of Bern — Uncertainty quantification and optimal design group | Dario Azzimonti | Contributions to Bayesian set estimation relying on random field priors | December 2016 |
| Best Multimodal Paper Award at the Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia Retrieval — Natural Language Processing group | Nikolaos Pappas, Mercan Topkara, Miriam Redi, Brendan Jou, Tao Chen, Hongyi Liu, Shih-Fu Chang | Multilingual Visual Sentiment Concept Matching | June 2016 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Paper Award at the Language and Technology Conference — Speech and audio processing group | Marzieh Razavi | Pronunciation Lexicon Development for Under-Resourced Languages Using Automatically Derived Subword Units: A Case Study on Scottish Gaelic | November 2015 |
| Premium Best Paper Award at IET Biometrics — Biometrics security & privacy group | Christopher McCool, Roy Wallace, Mitchell McLaren, Laurent El Shafey, Sébastien Marcel | Session variability modelling for face authentication | September 2015 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Biometrics Student Paper Award at the International Joint Conference on Biometrics — Biometrics security & privacy group | Laurent El Shafey | Audio-visual gender recognition in uncontrolled environment using variability modeling techniques | October 2014 |
| European Biometrics Research Award — Biometrics security & privacy group | Laurent El Shafey | Scalable Probabilistic Models: Applied to Face Identification in the Wild | September 2014 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Paper Award at the IEEE International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing — Perception and Activity Understanding | Vasil Khalidov, Florence Forbes and Radu Horaud | Alignment of Binocular-Binaural Data Using a Moving Audio-Visual Target | October 2013 |
| Best Paper Award for Performance Evaluation of Tracking and Surveillance — Perception and Activity Understanding | Alexandre Heili and Jean-Marc Odobez | Parameter Estimation and Contextual Adaptation for a Multi-Object Tracking CRF Model | January 2013 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outstanding Paper Award at the ACM Int. Conf. on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI), Santa Monica, USA — Social Computing | Dinesh Jayagopi, Dayra Sanchez-Cortes, Kazuhiro Otsuka, Junji Yamato, and Daniel Gatica-Perez | Linking Speaking and Looking Behavior Patterns with Group Composition, Perception, and Performance | October 2012 |
| Student Best Paper Award at the CVPR workshop on Gesture Recognition — Perception and Activity Understanding | Kenneth Funes | Gaze estimation from multimodal Kinect data | June 2012 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Paper Award at the IEEE Int. Symp. on Wearable Computers (ISWC) — Social Computing | Trinh-Minh-Tri Do and Daniel Gatica-Perez | GroupUs: Smartphone Proximity Data and Human Interaction Type Mining | June 2011 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Paper Award at the Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia Conference (MUM) — Social Computing | Raul Montoliu and Daniel Gatica-Perez | Discovering Human Places of Interest from Multimodal Mobile Phone Data | December 2010 |
| Workshop Best Paper Award at the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) — Biometrics security & privacy group | Venkatesh Bala Subburaman and Sébastien Marcel | Fast Bounding Box Estimation based Face Detection | September 2010 |
| Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition — Biometrics security & privacy group | Norman Poh, Josef Kittler, Sébastien Marcel, Driss Matrouf and Jean-Francois Bonastre | Model and Score Adaptation for Biometric Systems: Coping with Device Interoperability and Changing Acquisition Conditions | August 2010 |
| award | person | publication | date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best Student Paper Award at the International Conference on Multimedia and Expo — Perception and Activity Understanding | Stéphanie Lefèvre | Structure and appearance features for robust 3D facial actions tracking | June 2009 |
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