Awards
won by students advised by Alexander Gelbukh

Membership in SNI • International fellowships and internships • Lázaro Cardenas Gold Medals • Other Important Institutional Awards • National and International Awards • Institutional Awards • International Competitions of Algorithms • Degrees with Distinction

National Researcher of Mexico(member of the SNI)
 

SNI (National System of Researchers) is a certification authority for Mexican researchers funded and supervised by the CONACYT,  Mexican Ministry of Science and Technology. Membership in SNI comes with a substantial monetary award. Mexican scientists are evaluated every four years and can win one of four excellence levels (if any), from Candidate (lowest) to 3 (highest; a distinction of great importance for a Mexican scientist).
 
 

Lázaro Cardenas Gold Medal

Handed personally by the President of Mexico
        
 

Navonil Majumder (India) was awarded the Lázaro Cárdenas Gold Medal for his PhD study. He is one of very few persons to receive this award twice: in 2017 he received this Medal for his MSc study. This Medal is usually handed personally by the President of Mexico. As of July 2020, we do not yet know if the President Andrés Manuel López Obrador will hand it to Navonil personally or due to the coronavirus pandemic the arrangement will be different.

Navonil Majumder has received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2020; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Soujanya Poria.
     
 

Navonil Majumder (India) was awarded the Lázaro Cárdenas Gold Medal for his MSc study. Since he was at a research stay, his thesis advisor Alexander Gelbukh received the medal in his name from the hands of Enrique Peña Nieto, the President of Mexico, accompanied by Otto Granados Roldán, the Minister of Education of Mexico, and Mario Alberto Rodríguez Casas, Director General of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico. Presidential residence Los Pinos, May 21, 2018.

Navonil Majumder has received his MSc degree from CIC-IPN in 2017; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Yulia Ledeneva (Russia) receiving her Lázaro Cárdenas Gold Medal from the hands of Felipe Calderón, the then President of Mexico, accompanied by Enrique Villa Rivera, Director General (Rector) of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico. Presidential Palace, Constitution Square, 2009.

Yulia Ledeneva has received her PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2008; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.

The Gold Medal. Here is are a press release about the event.
     
 

Francisco Hiram Calvo Castro addressing Vicente Fox, the then President of Mexico, Reyes Tamez Guerra, the Minister of Education of Mexico, and  Enrique Villa Rivera, Director General (Rector) of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico, at the ceremony of presenting him the Lázaro Cárdenas Gold Medal. IPN, 2006.

Hiram Calvo received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2006; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.

Another photo from the ceremony, photo with the medal.
     
 

Yoel Ledo Mezquita (Cuba) receiving his Lázaro Cárdenas Gold Medal from the hands of Vicente Fox, the then President of Mexico, accompanied by Reyes Tamez Guerra, Secretary of Education of Mexico, and  Miguel Angel Correa Jasso, Director General (Rector) of the Instituto Politécnico Nacional, Mexico. Presidential Residence Los Pinos, 2003.

Yoel Ledo Mezquita received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2006; advisors: Grigori Sidorov and Alexander Gelbukh.

Another photo, diploma, the medal.
 

International Awards, Fellowships, and Internships

awarded via an open competition
 
     

Segun Taofeek Aroyehun (Nigeria) together with his advisor Alexander Gelbukh received Google’s Latin America Research Award 2020.

The award is given "to support the work of permanent faculty members and their students who are pursuing cutting-edge research in specific fields related to computer science at universities in Latin America." The monetary prize that accompanies the award is approx. USD 22,000. The award was given to 22 PhD and MSc students (with their advisors) in Latin America. The award received coverage from national media.

Segun Taofeek Aroyehun is a PhD student at CIC-IPN; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
     

Segun Taofeek Aroyehun (Nigeria) received the Microsoft Latin America PhD Award 2020.

According to a statement by Microsoft, the goal of the award is given to "support outstanding doctoral students in computing-related fields." Three Microsoft Latin America PhD Awards are given each year. The three winners are chosen based on a call open to all universities in Latin America and widely disseminated. The award includes Microsoft's USD 15,000 contribution to the CIC as the winning student's institution. The winners will be invited to a meeting to present their research to the experts at Microsoft Research.

Segun Taofeek Aroyehun is a PhD student at CIC-IPN; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
     

Alisa Zhila (Russia) received the Microsoft Research Latin America Fellowship 2012.

According to Microsoft, the fellows "represent the best and the brightest from Latin America." Two Microsoft Research Latin America Fellowships are awarded each year. The selection procedure was as follows: each Latin American university nominated no more than three candidates; of those pre-selected candidates, Microsoft selected two winners. There were about 60 candidates in this year, from about 40 universities from all Latin American countries.

The prize received considerable press coverage, e.g., see an article in Gaceta Politécnica (PDF) and very interesting videos. In Google you can find many press releases about Alisa Zhila.

Alisa Zhila was at the time of awarding a PhD student at CIC-IPN (graduated in 2014); advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Miguel Ángel Sánchez Pérez (Cuba) was invited for a 6-month internship at the Oracle Mexico Development Center, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, 2016. He worked on the Adaptive Bug Search project in the Automatic Storage Management team under the supervision of Erik Peterson and Sameer Joshi. Oracle Mexico Development Center, conducts research and development of Oracle's flagship product, the database, in collaboration with the centers in India and in USA.

Miguel Ángel Sánchez Pérez is a PhD student at CIC-IPN; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
     
 

Francisco Viveros Jiménez received a Microsoft Research Latin America Internship 2014. The internship includes three months of work at Microsoft Research, with salary paid. Seven Microsoft Research Latin America internships are awarded each year. The selection procedure was as follows: each Latin American university nominated no more than three candidates; of those pre-selected candidates, Microsoft selected seven winners. The prize received press coverage, e.g., see cover image and his interview in Gaceta Politécnica (PDF) and cover image in another issue of Gaceta Politécnica (PDF).

During his research project at Microsoft, Francisco Viveros was a PhD student of CIC-IPN (graduated in 2014); advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
     
 

Sergio Gonzalo Jiménez Vargas (Colombia) received a Microsoft Research Latin America Internship 2012. The internship includes three months of work at Microsoft Research, with salary paid. Seven Microsoft Research Latin America internships are awarded each year. The selection procedure was as follows: each Latin American university nominated no more than three candidates; of those pre-selected candidates, Microsoft selected seven winners. There were about 60 candidates in this year, from about 40 universities from all Latin American countries.

Sergio Gonzalo Jiménez Vargas is a PhD student at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Alisa Zhila (Russia) received a Microsoft Research Latin America Internship 2012, which was offered to her as a Microsoft Research Fellow. The internship included three months of work at Microsoft Research in Redmond, with salary paid.

Alisa Zhila was at the time of internship a PhD student at CIC-IPN (graduated in 2014); advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Alisa Zhila (Russia) was awarded a 3 month internship at the Oracle Mexico Development Center, Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, 2014. She worked on a research project in the Oracle Semantic Technologies group under the supervision of Dr. Michel Riviere. Oracle Mexico Development Center, conducts research and development of Oracle's flagship product, the database, in collaboration with the centers in India and in USA.

Alisa Zhila was at the time of internship a PhD student at CIC-IPN (graduated in 2014); advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Alisa Zhila (Russia) with Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO. Alisa was awarded a 12-week internship at Yahoo! Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA, in the Platform Cloud Services team, in Summer 2014. Her project involves research on automatic failure detection at early stages using analysis of social network comments. The work on the project involves application of knowledge in machine learning and natural language processing. She works with a text corpus, applying various machine learning methods and investigating their application to automatic failure detection at early stages. Another photo: Alisa at the Headquarter facilities of Yahoo in Sunnyvale, CA.

Alisa Zhila was at the time of internship a PhD student at CIC-IPN (graduated in 2014); advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Partha Pakray (India) received a Xerox Research Internship 2012.

Xerox Research Internship includes six months of work at Xerox, with salary paid.

Partha Pakray was at the time of internship a PhD student at Jadavpur University, India, and was graduated in 2013; advisors Sivaji Bandyopadhyay and Alexander Gelbukh.
 

Important Institutional Awards

handed personally by the Director General (President) of the IPN (IPN has over 300,000 students).
        
 

Navonil Majumder (India) received the Best PhD  Thesis 2020 award from the IPN (National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico), for the thesis: Latent Memory-Based Neural Models for Sentiment Analysis of Multimodal Multi-Party Conversations. This award is presented yearly by the Director General (President) of the IPN. IPN has an enrollment of more than 300,000 students. The award was accompanied by a monetary prize of over 3,000 US dollars to the student and the advisors.

Navonil Majumder has received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2020; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Soujanya Poria.
        
 

Navonil Majumder (India) received the Best Academic Performance in 2018–2019 award from the IPN (National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico). This award is presented yearly by the Director General (President) of the IPN. IPN has an enrollment of more than 300,000 students.

Navonil Majumder has received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2020; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Soujanya Poria.
        
 

Navonil Majumder (India) received the Award for the Best Academic Performance in 2016–2017 from the IPN (National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico). This award is presented yearly by the Director General (President) of the IPN. IPN has an enrollment of more than 300,000 students.

Navonil Majumder has received his MSc degree from CIC-IPN in 2017; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
        
 

Miguel Ángel Sánchez Pérez (Cuba) received the Award for the Best Academic Performance in 2013–2014 from the IPN (National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico). This award is presented yearly by the Director General (President) of the IPN. IPN has an enrollment of more than 300,000 students.

Miguel Sánchez was at the time of awarding an MSc student (currently graduated) of CIC-IPN in 2013; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
        
 

Francisco Viveros Jiménez received an Award for Best Academic Performance in 2011–2012 from IPN (National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico). This award is presented  yearly by the Director General (President) of the IPN. IPN has an enrollment of more than 300,000 students.

Francisco Viveros was at the time a PhD student (currently graduated) of CIC-IPN; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
     
 

Francisco Hiram Calvo Castro received an Award for Post-Graduate Thesis in 2006. This award is presented by the Director General (President) of the IPN (National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico) and is presented yearly to the best theses defended at the Institute. The award is accompanied by monetary prize approximately equivalent to US $3,600 (as of 2006).

Hiram Calvo received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2006; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Francisco Hiram Calvo Castro received an Award for Best Average Marks of the school (CIC, Center for Computing Research) in 2005–2006. This award is presented  yearly by the Director General (President) of the IPN (National Polytechnic Institute of Mexico).

Hiram Calvo received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2006; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
 

National and International Awards
        
 

Wei Han  (IHong Kong) win the Best Paper award at the very prestgious  international conference ACMICMI 2021, 3rd ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction.    , organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Latent Memory-Based Neural Models for Sentiment Analysis of Multimodal Multi-Party Conversations.

Navonil Majumder has received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2020; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Soujanya Poria.
 

Navonil Majumder (India) received the award for the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence, first place, at the 2020 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence, organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Latent Memory-Based Neural Models for Sentiment Analysis of Multimodal Multi-Party Conversations.

Navonil Majumder has received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2020; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Soujanya Poria.
        

A nombre de la Mesa Directiva de la Sociedad Mexicana de Inteligencia Artificial (SMIA), le agradecemos haber participado en el concurso premio José Negrete a las mejores tesis de Maestría y Doctorado desarrolladas en algún campo de la Inteligencia Artificial.

Los trabajos recibidos son de una calidad extraordinaria y el proceso de selección ha sido arduo y difícil. De esta manera, la Mesa Directiva de la SMIA ha decidido otorgar a su trabajo de tesis el: 

Tercer lugar en la categoría de Tesis de Maestría

Por razones de la pandemia, no habrá una entrega presencial en la 19a edición del "Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence", pero enviaremos su diploma en formato digital en breve. Le contactaremos posteriormente para indicarle el formato para publicar el breve artículo de divulgación en la revista Komputer Sapiens.

 

Muhammad Hammad Fahim Siddiqui (Pakistan) won the award for the best MSc thesis in Artificial Intelligence, third place, at the 2020 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence, organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Latent Memory-Based Neural Models for Sentiment Analysis of Multimodal Multi-Party Conversations.

Muhammad Hammad Fahim Siddiqui has received his MSc degree from CIC-IPN in 2020; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
        
 

Francisco Javier García López received the award for the best MSc thesis in Artificial Intelligence, second place, at the 2018 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence, organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Analysis of Associations between Financial Time Series and Social Network Activity.

Francisco Javier García López has received his MSc degree from CIC-IPN in 2018; advisors: Ildar Batyrshin and Alexander Gelbukh.
        
 

Navonil Majumder (India) received the award for the best MSc thesis in Artificial Intelligence, third place, at the 2017 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence, organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis in Social Media using Deep Learning with Convolutional Neural Networks.

Navonil Majumder has received his MSc degree from CIC-IPN in 2017; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
        
 

Francisco Viveros Jiménez received the award for the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence, first place, at the 2014 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Word sense disambiguation through associative dictionaries.

Francisco Viveros received his PhD degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2014; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
        
 

Miguel Ángel Sánchez Pérez received the award for the best MSc thesis in Artificial Intelligence, second place, at the 2014 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Detección automática de plagio a través de formación de pasajes.

Miguel Sánchez received his MSc degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2013; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
        
 

Alisa Zhila was named a distinguished member of the the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA) as "the first Mexican student internationally recognized as Microsoft Research Latin America Fellow, for glorifying Mexico and the SMIA by achieving international recognition to artificial intelligence research in Mexico."

Alisa Zhila was at the time of awarding a PhD student at CIC-IPN (graduated in 2014); advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
        
 

Alfredo López Monroy received the award for the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence, second place, at the 2013 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Recuperación de información para respuesta a preguntas en documentos legales.

Alfredo López received his PhD degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2013; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Hiram Calvo.
     
 

Sabino Miranda Jiménez received the award for the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence, third place, at the 2013 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Modelo para la generación automática de resúmenes abstractivos basado en grafos conceptuales.

Sabino Miranda received his PhD degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2013; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
     
 

Rodrigo Gabino Ramírez Moreno received the award for the best MSc thesis in Artificial Intelligence, third place, at the 2012 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Genración de musica con gramaticas formales.

Gabino Ramírez received his MSc degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2011; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Sergio Gonzalo Jiménez Vargas (Colombia), together with Alexander Gelbukh, received the best paper award (first place) at the 2011 Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2011, for the paper: SC spectra: A new soft cardinality approximation for text comparison.

Sergio Gonzalo Jiménez Vargas is a PhD student at the National University, Colombia; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh. MICAI 2011 conference received 348 submissions from 40 countries.
     
 

Olga Kolesnikova (Russia) received the award for the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence, first place, at the 2011 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Automatic extraction of lexical functions.

Olga Kolesnikova received her PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2011; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Olga Kolesnikova (Russia), together with Alexander Gelbukh, received the best paper award (first place) at the 2010 Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2010, for the paper: Supervised Machine Learning for Predicting the Meaning of Verb-Noun Combinations in Spanish.

Olga Kolesnikova was at that time a PhD student at, and now holds a PhD degree from, CIC-IPN; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh. MICAI 2010 conference received over 300 submissions from 34 countries.
     
 

Grettel Barcelo Alonso (Cuba) received the award for the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence, second place, at the 2010 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Desambiguación de los sentidos de las palabras en español usando textos paralelos.

Grettel Barcelo Alonso received her PhD degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2010; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
     
 

Miguel Angel Ríos Gaona received the award for the best MSc thesis in Artificial Intelligence, second place, at the 2010 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Word Sense Disambiguation and recognizing Textual Entailment with Statistical Methods.

Miguel Angel Ríos Gaona received his MSc degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2010; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Sivaji Bandyopadhyay.
     
 

Yulia Ledeneva (Russia) received the award for the best PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence, third place, at the 2009 national competition of theses on Artificial Intelligence organized by the Mexican Society of Artificial Intelligence (SMIA), for the thesis: Automatic language-independent detection of multiword descriptions for text summarization.

Yulia Ledeneva received her PhD degree with honors from CIC-IPN in 2008; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Yulia Ledeneva (Russia) received the Best Paper Award, Second place, at the Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2008. The conference received about 400 submissions from 43 countries.

Yulia Ledeneva received her PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2008; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Steve Legrand (Finland / Australia) received the Best Poster Award, Second place, at the Mexican International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, MICAI 2007. The conference received about 485 submissions from 43 countries.

Steve Legrand received his PhD degree from University of Jyväskylä, Finlandia, in 2007; advisors: Pasi Tyrväinen and Alexander Gelbukh.
     
 

Francisco Hiram Calvo Castro, together with Alexander Gelbukh and Adam Kilgarriff, received the Best Presentation Award at the 6th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics, CICLing 2005, for presentation of the paper Distributional Thesaurus vs. WordNet: A Comparison of Backoff Techniques for Unsupervised PP Attachment. Elected via ballot among all attendees of the conference, out of 53 oral presentations. The conference received 151 submissions from 26 countries.

Hiram Calvo received his PhD degree from CIC-IPN in 2006; advisor: Alexander Gelbukh..
 

Institutional Awards
        
 

Miguel Angel Sánchez Pérez (Cuba) received a Diploma for Best MSc thesis in Computer Science of the school (CIC, Center for Computing Research) in 2014. The best thesis of the school is selected yearly by the Council of Professors of the school. The MSc program in Computer Science of CIC has enrollment of more than 200 students.

Miguel Angel Sánchez Pérez received MSc degree from CIC-IPN; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
     
 

Miguel Angel Sánchez Pérez (Cuba) received a Diploma for Best Best Academic Performance of the Computer Science Program of the school (CIC, Center for Computing Research) in 2013–2014. The best thesis of the school is selected yearly by the Council of Professors of the school. The MSc program in Computer Science of CIC has enrollment of more than 200 students.

Miguel Angel Sánchez Pérez received MSc degree from CIC-IPN; advisors: Alexander Gelbukh and Grigori Sidorov.
 

Competitions of Algorithms
 

Degree with Distinction
 

Cum laude degree by IPN, Mexico.

This is the only (and thus the highest) distinction awarded by this university for theses of extraordinary quality.

PhD:

MSc:

Mención laureada by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

This is the highest honors degree awarded by this school (equivalent to summa cum laude) awarded to less than 1% of graduates.

Mención meritoria by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

This is the second highest honors degree awarded by this school (equivalent to cum laude), awarded to less than 10% of graduates.

Mención honorífica by the Universidad de Sonora.

  • Francisco Ortigoza García, PhD, 2017, advisors Alexander Gelbukh and Constantino Martínez Fabián

Here is how they achieved it.