Qualcomm Announced Innovation Fellowship Europe Winners

Qualcomm announced the winners of the Innovation Fellowship (QIF) Europe program, now in its 15th year. It is an annual program that focuses on recognizing, rewarding, and mentoring the most innovative engineering PhD students across Europe, India, and the United States. The European program rewards excellent young researchers in the fields of AI and cybersecurity with individual prizes of $40,000.

“This year we received almost 50% more submissions than last year, which speaks to the growing field of machine learning, as well as the need to keep our rapidly developing software and hardware more secure,” said Michael Hofmann, Senior Director of Engineering at Qualcomm Netherlands. “The proposals this year ranged from fundamental algorithms and large language models to exciting applications such as extended reality, generalizable computer vision, RNA design, and more. We are honored to mentor all the winners further in their research.”

The seventeen finalists were PhD candidates from ETH Zurich, Imperial College London, University of Edinburgh, Tübingen University, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, TU Delft, and Czech Technical University. After careful review, the following five winners were selected for their outstanding proposals. Dongqing Wang for “Towards visually plausible and controllable 360° Virtual Reality”, Neelu S. Kalani for “FlashPoint: Secure Dynamic Root of Trust “, Chaitanya K. Joshi for “Geometric Generative Models for 3D RNA Design”, Afra Amini for “An Adventure Towards Effective Controlled Text Generation”, and  Runa Eschenhagen for “Towards Understanding Curvature Matrices in Deep Learning”.