Academic Awards 2023 booklet

11 General comments Overall we were impressed with the quality of the work of the BSc theses that were submitted. We noted that this year, most submissions were exceptionally strong in their core discipline. We felt though that in comparison to earlier years, fewer submissions had ventured beyond the borders of their own discipline. The jury also thought that, this year even more so than earlier years, candidates were really close to each other in terms of quality, making it extremely hard to select the #1 or even Top 3. Naming of the winner of the award In the end, we selected RENATE DEBETS as the winner for her BSc thesis entitled “Pruning of RPA Decoders for Reed-Muller Codes Based on Projection Effectiveness and Uniqueness” for the TU/e Academic Awards, with honorable mentions for Willem Verheyen and Jolijn Dellevoet. Renate Debets’ work was not only original but also extremely relevant and effective, reducing the complexity of operations of a decoder by a factor of 20. Her work was also theoretically well-founded, as she managed to prove this first through simulations but then also analytically. The work is demonstrably of high scientific quality, as she was hired immediately by her mentors to integrate her work with that of an ongoing PhD project and this work was submitted – and accepted – as a paper at the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Her writing is of exceptionally high quality, as were her presentation skills during her defense, so we hear. According to her mentors, Renate was enthusiastic, highly independent, organized and incredibly fast at grasping complicated new concepts. Laudatio Renate Debets examined an error-correction algorithm for telecommunications systems that require extremely high reliability, for instance for driving cars that communicate with each other to avoid collisions or for autonomous robots in industrial settings that have to be perfectly coordinated. Renate proved that a large fraction of the operations this decoder performs are redundant and can in fact be removed, reducing the complexity by a factor of up to 20. Her work thus takes a very significant step towards making the decoder useful in practical systems. In real life, of course these systems can only have extremely low latency and must have exceptionally high reliability. So the work Renate did was not only original but also extremely relevant and effective. The work was also theoretically well-founded, as she managed to prove this first through simulations but then also analytically. The high scientific quality is demonstrated clearly by her being recruited immediately by her mentors to integrate her work with that of an ongoing PhD project and this work was submitted – and accepted – as a paper at the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. On top of the quality and impact – practical and scientific – of this BSc report we should add that it was extremely well written and, as pointed out by the supervisors, Renate did all this enthusiastically, highly independently, and super organized. Quite uniquely, Renate does not only have this outstanding methodological and theoretical knowledge: she is at the same time also very hands-on, as witnessed by her side jobs in and outside the university, as analyst, team coordinator and as student assistant. In her cv Renate writes that she is fascinated by the “magic of electronics”. We as committee can only conclude that Renate can DO magic with electronics and convey our warm congratulations. REPORT OF THE JURY