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Rita Sevastjanova wins Südwestmetall sponsorship award for AI research!
Rita Sevastjanova from the University of Konstanz receives the Südwestmetall Sponsorship Prize 2025 for her important dissertation on AI.
Rita Sevastjanova wins Südwestmetall sponsorship award for AI research!
On April 3, 2025, Rita Sevastjanova was awarded the renowned Südwestmetall Sponsorship Prize 2025. This prize is part of an annual tradition that honors outstanding dissertations from young scientists at universities in Baden-Württemberg. This year, a total of nine researchers were honored, with Sevastjanova being honored for her dissertation in Daniel Keim's working group at the University of Konstanz.
Sevastjanova’s dissertation is titled “Interactive Visual Investigation of Word Embedding Contextualizations in Large Language Models.” In her work, she has made significant progress in understanding large AI language models (LLM) such as the well-known GPT models. What is particularly noteworthy is that she has developed graphic analysis approaches to examine the complex “contextual embeddings”. These mathematical representations of words adapt to the respective linguistic context and thus open up new perspectives for the analysis of language models and their generated texts.
Innovative approaches to language model research
Sevastjanova's methods not only provide deeper insights into how language models work, but also enable personalized decision support for selecting such models based on user preferences. The prize is endowed with 5,000 euros and is presented by Dr. Joachim Schulz, chairman of Südwestmetall. Sevastjanova is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the “Interactive Visualization and Intelligence Augmentation (IVIA)” laboratory at ETH Zurich.
The Südwestmetall Sponsorship Prize has been awarded for 35 years and has established itself as an important component in promoting young scientists. At the award ceremony, Schulz emphasized that the award-winning dissertations made a significant contribution to the industrial world of work and to socio-political framework conditions.
Significance of the award
In his speech, State Secretary Arne Braun emphasized the relevance of the connection between science and business and emphasized the role of young researchers in the current social and political challenges. Schulz pointed out the massive changes in the framework conditions in Baden-Württemberg, which are caused by technological upheavals, digitalization, sustainability goals and demographic change.
The award was given to the following young scientists:
| name | university | Topic of the dissertation |
|---|---|---|
| Dr. Nicholas Goby | Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg | Deep Reinforcement Learning in Operations Management Concepts and Application |
| Dr. Johannes U. Dahlke | University of Hohenheim | Flooding the Landscape of Knowledge: Perspectives on Transitions to Artificial Intelligence in Industry |
| Dr. Ali Riza Durmaz | Karlsruhe Institute of Technology | Experimental and Data-driven Workflows for Microstructure-based Damage Prediction |
| Dr. Felix Petersen | University of Konstanz | Learning with Differentiable Algorithms |
| Dr. Aline Lanzrath | University of Mannheim | Talent and diversity management in sales: An empirical study of the success factors for attracting and retaining sales talent |
| Dr. Kathrin Pollmann | University of Stuttgart | A Human-Centered Pattern Approach to Comprehensible and Pleasant Behavioral Expressions for Social Robots |
| Dr. Michael Niemeyer | Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen | Neural Scene Representations for 3D Reconstruction and Generative Modeling |
| Dr. Franziska Babel | University of Ulm | Derivation and Evaluation of Psychological Conflict Resolution Strategies for Autonomous Service Robots |
This year's award ceremony not only underlines the outstanding research achievements of the award-winning scientists, but also the need for crisis-proof and reliable financing of the university system in order to ensure high-quality research and teaching. University of Konstanz reports that Sevastjanova's work and that of the other laureates will make a valuable contribution to the future of science.
For further information about the funding awards and the role of the Südwestmetall employers' association, please visit Southwest metal.