AFCEA: Awards for Christian A. Müller and José A. Alvarez Ruiz

After the triple prize last year by Robert Müller, Thomas Breuer and Martin Weier, this year a duo brought the laurel wreaths to the university.

Christian Atanas Müller convinced the experts with his work "3D Object Shape Categorization in Domestic Environments". The laureate therein answers the question of how to get a robot to classify objects on the fly (his complete master thesis here in pdf format). Immediately following his graduation, Müller has now begun his PhD on a related topic at the Jacobs University Bremen.

José Antonio Alvarez Ruiz was honored for his master's thesis "Active Scene Text Recognition for a Domestic Service Robot". With the development of an algorithm for complete text recognition Alvarez Ruiz makes an important contribution towards the improvement of service robots.

The results of the two former students were implemented in the service robot Jenny (Care-O-bot 3) of the Fraunhofer Institute. Alvarez Ruiz and Müller were both part of the successful Robocup Team b-it-bots of the university.

The prizes were granted at a conference in Koblenz on 30 August 2012 in the Falckenstein-Kaserne with more than 400 visitors present. At the department of computer science both works were supervised by Prof. Dr. Paul G. Ploger.