Swissengineering Award Ticino 2025

The PREMIOSWISSENGINEERINGTICINO Foundation aims to recognise the work of recent graduates in engineering and architecture and provide financial support to young talents from vocational schools and universities in the Canton of Ticino. In the 2025 edition of the prize, celebrated on 24 May, Nicolai Hermann, a graduate of the Master in Artificial Intelligence, won in the "USI Faculty of Informatics" category. Jean-Marc Emmanuel Gnagne received the award in the "USI Academy of Architecture" category. Additionally, Jeferson Morales Mariciano was awarded the USI TALENTICINO Scholarship.

Nicolai Hermann earned his Master Artificial Intelligence from the Faculty of Informatics at USI. His thesis, titled "Perceptually-Driven Neural Inpainting for Seamless 3D Reconstructions," was supervised by Professor Piotr Didyk and co-supervised by Jorge Condor, both affiliated with the IDSIA Institute. The thesis introduces a novel method for detecting and correcting defects in 3D reconstructions, addressing the limitations of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) and 3DGS. It combines autoencoders, a perceptual metric, and neural inpainting techniques to enhance the visual quality of scenes.

The USI Master's Prize in the Academy of Architecture category was awarded to Jean-Marc Emmanuel Gnagne, a graduate of the Master in Architecture, for his thesis titled "Passing Through: (Re)discovering Elsi." This work explores the multisensory perception of Elsässerstrasse through field observations, drawings, and urban interventions, drawing inspiration from Burckhardt's promenadology. The result is a book that interprets the street and proposes methods for actively rediscovering urban spaces.

Both Nicolai Hermann and Jean-Marc Emmanuel Gnagne were awarded a prize of CHF 1,000 each.

Also from the Faculty of Informatics, Jeferson Morales Mariciano, a graduate of the Bachelor in Informatics, received the TALENTICINO Scholarship, a prize of CHF 3,000 awarded to deserving recent graduates with a Bachelor's degree in informatics or architecture from USI, of Swiss or foreign nationality, who intend to continue their studies to obtain a Master's degree in Switzerland and are enrolled in the 2025/2026 academic year.

Rebecca Palmieri, a graduate of the Master in Architecture, and Cristiano Colangelo, a graduate of the Master in Software & Data Engineering, were also awarded prizes by USI for the best presentations.

The jury of the PREMIOSWISSENGINEERINGTICINO Foundation used the candidate assessment platform developed by the CodeLounge research centre of the Software Institute at USI.