The award was presented by the DAGM (German Association for Pattern Recognition) on September 11 at the Garching campus of the Technical University of Munich during the GCPR-VMV 2024 (German Conference on Pattern Recognition & Symposium on Vision, Modeling, and Visualization). Dr. Croce's dissertation titled "Evaluating and Improving the Robustness of Image Classifiers against Adversarial Attacks", was submitted to the Faculty of Science at the University of Tübingen. "With his work, Dr. Croce is shaping the crucial research area of robustness against adversarial attacks in machine vision and computer vision. Such attacks threaten AI applications across all industries by corrupting the necessary machine learning models through manipulation of input data, such as images. Dr. Croce's dissertation thus presents many results with significant implications for computer vision applications. His method 'AutoAttack' already has become the de facto standard for evaluating adversarial robustness due to its reliable and efficient performance. Additionally, his robustness benchmark 'RobustBench' enables the standardized comparison of adversarial defenses, accelerating the research in this field. We are extremely pleased that Dr. Croce's work has been honored with the DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award by the Technical Committee of DAGM," says Prof. Carsten Steger, Director of Research at MVTec Software GmbH.

This year marks the tenth time the DAGM has presented the DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award. The award honors an outstanding dissertation completed in the previous year in the fields of pattern recognition, image processing, machine vision, and machine learning. The GCPR, as the venue for the award presentation, is the internationally renowned annual conference of DAGM, which is celebrating its 46th edition in 2024. As a regular sponsor of GCPR, MVTec Software GmbH reaffirms its commitment to research and education in the field of machine vision. Its co-founder, Prof. Carsten Steger, has been a long-time member of DAGM and served on its Technical Committee from 2013 to 2021, including three years as chairman.