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From News Desk

Qualcomm Technologies unveiled the latest recipients of the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) Europe, an award now marking its 17th edition. This year’s five fellows are Mar Gonzàlez I Català (University of Cambridge), Jiajun He (University of Cambridge), Abhinandan Pal (University of Birmingham), Naila Sebastián Esandi (INRIA / ENSAE Paris); and Christopher Wewer (Max Planck Institute for Informatics).

Held each year across Europe, India and the United States, QIF exists to spotlight, celebrate and nurture the engineering PhD students producing the field’s boldest work. In Europe, the fellowship turns its focus to promising early-career talent in AI and cybersecurity, giving every recipient a USD 40,000 award alongside one-on-one mentorship from the Qualcomm Technologies research team.

“Submissions climbed to an all-time high this year—close to 50 percent above last year’s total—which says a great deal about how fast machine learningAI is moving, and how vital it is to keep our rapidly evolving hardware and software secure,” said Michael Hofmann, Senior Director, Engineering, Qualcomm Technologies Netherlands B.V. “What stood out was the sheer range of the proposals, stretching from multimodal generation, trustworthy agents, world models, robotics; and generative AI safety to hardware verification, secure systems, privacy, communications, edge AI and machine learning for scientific discovery. We’re honored to continue mentoring each of the winners as their research unfolds.”

This year’s five fellows emerged from a shortlist of eighteen finalists, drawn from PhD programmes at CISPA, ETH Zurich, INRIA, KU Leuven, Max Planck Institute for Informatics, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Max Planck Institute for Security and Privacy, Technical University of Munich, University of Amsterdam, University of Birmingham, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and University of Tübingen.