The fifth "Hedy Lamarr" prize awarded by the city of Vienna was awarded to Shqiponja Ahmetaj, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Research Unit for Knowledge-Based Systems.
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| Shqiponja Ahmetaj in the middle holding the "Hedy Lamarr" award |
"With the Hedy Lamarr Award, we highlight the extraordinary achievements of female computer scientists for the 5th time, making their power in the field visible. Five years of Hedy Lamarr will mean: Five years of visible recognition for women who create great things in future industries" said during the ceremony the deputy mayor and the city councilor for women Kathrin Gaál, as local media reports.
While the city's science adviser Veronica Kaup-Hasler added: "The winners of the Hedy Lamarr award are role models for girls and young women. They show that all genders can have successful careers in IT."
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| Shqiponja Ahmetaj holding the "Hedy Lamarr" award with her hands |
"I am very grateful and happy to have received the Hedy Lamarr 2022 award", emphasized the award winner Shqiponja Ahmetaj in her acceptance speech. "In our digital age, data plays an increasingly important role. It must be accurate and reliable to be useful to people and applications. However, given the unprecedented variety and amount of data, we now have at our disposal, this is precisely what is too often not guaranteed. In particular, data stored online may be incomplete or inaccurate, leading to false conclusions. Thus, data quality assurance is a more pressing challenge today than ever. I am working to lay the foundations for automated data quality management, focusing on online data. I hope, through my work, I will encourage other young women to pursue a career in computing.”
Who is Shqiponja Ahmetaj?
Shqiponja Ahmetaj received her doctorate in 2019 at the Institute of Logic and Computing at TU Wien Informatics. Internationally, she has worked in various European universities (Dresden, Bolzano, Oxford, Edinburgh, St. Petersburg) and in the industry (Trento, California). Shqiponja Ahmetaj's research results have been presented in several prestigious journals and professional events and are also noted for touching on various research areas – such as knowledge representation and reasoning, artificial intelligence, database theory, and semantic networks.
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| Shqiponja Ahmetaj holding a file in her hands and looking up to her left |
"In her research, Shqiponja Ahmetaj develops the theoretical foundations for automatic data quality assurance on the web paying attention to practicability and robustness," said Laura Kovács, Professor of Formal Methods and System Engineering at TU Wien Informatics and jury member, explaining jury selection. "Like Hedy Lamarr, Shqiponja Ahmetaj turns her head after an international career. As a mother and scientist in a male-dominated field, she is an outstanding role model and a worthy award winner, especially for young women and academic women.”