EAMT Best Thesis Award 2023 assigned to Marco Gaido

Marco Gaido, currently a post-doc researcher in the Machine Translation Unit at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, has been awarded for the Best European Doctoral Thesis on Machine Translation. He received the prize at the 25th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation, held from June 24th to 27th in Sheffield. A panel of experts evaluated his work based on the challenge of the problem tackled, the relevance of the results for the field of machine translation, and the impact in terms of scientific publications.

Marco’s thesis on “Direct Speech Translation: Toward High-Quality, Inclusive, and Augmented Systems” marks an important step in speech translation research. The recognition of his work, supervised by Matteo Negri and Marco Turchi, awards the excellence of both our young talents and the scientific research conducted at FBK.

After José Camargo De Souza in 2017 and Mattia Antonino Di Gangi in 2021, this is the third time a PhD student from FBK’s MT Unit has obtained this recognition. 

“It has been a privilege to work with Marco over the last four years,” says Matteo Negri. “The thesis reflects his ambition, curiosity, and dedication to solving difficult problems, which were crucial for advancements not only in terms of technical solutions but also toward innovative applications and responses to urgent ethical issues in AI.”

“A wonderful result” adds Luisa Bentivogli, head of the MT Unit, “which not only recognizes Marco’s merits but also rewards the Unit’s consistency in conducting cutting-edge research and its ability to work as a team, fostering individual initiative while placing it at the center of common interests as catalyst for growth.”