RICAIP’s vision is to establish itself as one of the critical European research infrastructures, a centre of excellence based on an international team of top scientists, well anchored in the collaborative ecosystem of academia, industry, and national authorities, with a positive impact on the society as a whole. For that reason, we established the RICAIP Young Investigator Award (RYIA) – to support and encourage young researchers. The first ever awards announcement took place on 30 November 2022 as part of the opening ceremony of RICAIP Testbed Brno. Evaluation of all nominated participants was very close. The expert committee agreed that all nominations were of high quality and completely comparable.
The goal of the RICAIP Young Investigator Award is to appreciate the best scientific contribution performed by the candidate within the Industry 4.0 domains, mainly in the areas of industrial digitalization, automation, robotics, AI-based solutions, machine learning, big data, computer vision, IoT, industrial software and other related fields. The organization of the first year of RIYA was organized by the CEITEC Brno University of Technology. The winners were chosen by an expert committee.
3rd Place:
Third place went to Caspar Jacob MS.C. from DFKI. He was nominated by Prof. Dr. Antonio Krüger and Dr. Tim Schwartz. Caspar specializes in mixed reality applications for Industry 4.0 in general and for human-robot collaboration, in particular. The committee apprecitated primarily that he was a key-developer for the VR-part of the joint DFKI-ZeMA RICAIP demonstrator, showing cross-site human-human collaboration using a UR-10 robot as embodiment for the remote worker.
2nd Place:
The second awardee is Ing. Michal Skalský from CEITEC BUT who was nominated by Dr. Zdeněk Havránek. The committee particularly highlighted the candidate’s scientific contribution in the field of specialized sensors for measurement of motion and position with special attention to fibre-optical sensors, prmarily his design and implemtation of very precise interferometric free-space optical sensor for dynamic displacement measurement achieving pm accuracy utilizing closed-loop control.
1st Place:
And finally the winner… The first ever winner is Ing. Varun Burde from CIIRC CTU who was nominated by Dr. Pavel Burget. The expert committee highlighted synergies with the objectives of RICAIP in the form of research contributions addressing the core tasks of object manipulation, using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and vision methods combined with industry 4.0 standards based on realized experiments and the existence of own demonstrations.
Congratulations to all awardees, we wish them much success in their research careers and thanks for the involvement in this historically first ever year.
The members of the RYIA 2022 Committee:
Chair of the Jury: Dr. Tilman Becker, RICAIP Director
Prof. Wolfgang Wahlster, CEA DFKI
Prof. Vladimír Mařík, Scientific Director CIIRC CTU
Prof. Martin Weiter, BUT Vice-Rector for Research
Prof. Pavel Václavek, Research Group Leader, CEITEFFC BUT
Dr. Khansa Rekid, Researcher, ZeMA
