However, the faculty has decided to select three more students to receive the Faculty Master's Thesis Prize 2024. We are pleased to announce that Violeta Cespedes Izquierdo (B&CS), Charis Fountas (BMS) and Piyush Bagad (AI) will receive this award. The faculty is proud to see so many promising and original theses written and looks forward to judging the new batch of theses for the UvA Master’s Thesis Prize 2025.

Heleen Mulder (MSc Physics & Astronomy):

“Her thesis goes far beyond what can be expected of a master student. Heleen was performing at the level of a senior researcher, as also evidenced by her well-received talk at an international workshop with many world-leading experts on this topic.

The research subject is topical, timely and state-of-the art, as evidenced by the fact that similar results were obtained around around the same time by a group of Japanese researchers, which is the only reason the results were not published. The thesis presents an exciting discovery, that has the potential to influence the further development of this field, which is moreover presented in a rigorous, in-depth and extremely clear way, at the highest level of scientific quality.

Last, but not least, Heleen has written an outstanding layman summary of her thesis work that accessibly explains this challenging theoretical work to a broader audience.”

Violeta Céspedes Izquierdo (MSc Brain & Cognitive Sciences):

“This literature thesis aims to provide a critical discussion of some of the main therapeutical approaches for addressing emotional dysfunctions. This is done by first providing a theoretical and computational definition of consciousness, and by then comparing the therapeutical approaches on the basis of their scientific and philosophical foundations. This is a comprehensive piece of work that shows an impressive level of scholarly competence, well beyond what is commonly observed in students.

The thesis is characterized by its interdisciplinary approach, in which theory, computation and psychological practice are joined into a unitary body of work. The problem is clearly stated, and the whole thesis combines a level of general accessibility in the beginning with a progressing in-depth discussions of the field. The conclusions demonstrate that the student has become a true expert in the field.”

Charis Fountas (MSc Biological Sciences):

“This is an exemplary thesis that combines molecular biology, microscopy and developmental biology to tackle a fundamental question in embryonic development.

Data are clearly presented. I liked the inclusion of some of the raw data in the supplemental section. The methodology is excellent and the amount of work performed impressive. Discussion could have been a bit more critical, it is always nice when limitations are mentioned. Very creative approach using an innovative set of experimental techniques.”

Piyush Bagad (MSc Artificial Intelligence):

“For his master’s thesis, Piyush focused on foundation models. These are a revolutionary class of new AI systems that display emergent behaviour and provide impressive abilities to generate text, images, computer programs and more, by learning from huge amounts of data. Famous examples are ChatGPT, Bard and Stable Diffusion. However, the behaviour of these foundation models is poorly understood and often unpredictable. Piyush studied video foundation models and questions their temporal awareness.

Part of Piyush’s thesis has been published as a paper at Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the world’s most prestigious AI conference. According to Google Scholar, CVPR currently ranks as the fourth most cited scientific publication, just after Nature, The New England Journal of Medicine and Science. Piyush was the first UvA Master AI student to publish at CVPR.”