Dr Gabriel Villalonga and Dr Sounak Day receive UAB’s PhD special award

Dr Gabriel Villalonga and Dr Sounak Day receive UAB’s PhD special award

Dr Gabriel Villalonga and Dr Sounak Dey have been awarded PhD Special Award by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). This award recognizes the quality of their doctoral theses, which have made significant contributions and advancements in their respective fields.

The UAB’s PhD special awards hold immense value within the university community, emphasizing the exceptional quality and impact of the awarded theses. They are granted annually, in accordance with the doctoral regulations and specific criteria outlined by each doctoral program at UAB.

Dr Villalonga and Dr Dey are among the five winners of the Computer Science PhD program in the course 2020-2021.

Dr Gabriel Villalonga

After doing his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the UAB, Dr Gabriel Villalonga started his PhD on autonomous driving at CVC, under the supervision of Dr Antonio M López (CVC/UAB) and Dr German Ros (Intel). Gabriel presented his thesis “Leveraging Synthetic Data to Create Autonomous Driving Perception Systems” on February 19, 2021.

Gabriel's thesis focuses on leveraging synthetic data to alleviate manual annotation for three perception tasks related to driving assistance and autonomous driving. In all cases, the use of deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) was assumed to develop the perception models.

▶️  Watch Dr Gabriel Villalonga's thesis defence - Video presentation

Dr Sounak Dey

Dr Sounak Day presented his thesis "Mapping between Images and Conceptual Spaces: Sketch-based Image Retrieval" on November 23, 2020, under the supervision of Dr Josep Lladós (CVC/UAB) and Dr Umapada Pal (Indian Statistical Institute).

In his thesis, Dr Dey presented several contributions to the literature on sketch-based image retrieval (SBIR).

▶️  Watch Dr Sounak Dey's thesis defence - Video presentation

The award ceremony was held on May 19 at the Exe Campus Hotel, located in the UAB Vila Universitaria.

The UAB's PhD Special Prize not only recognizes the exceptional work of Dr Gabriel Villalonga and Dr Sounak Dey but also serves as an inspiration for all aspiring researchers within the UAB community. Their dedication, commitment, and outstanding contributions exemplify the pursuit of excellence in academic research.

Congratulations!

Watch the video of the awards ceremony: