Congratulations to medal winners Feiyue Tao, who has been awarded the Postgraduate Medal for Academic Excellence, and Edmund Hofflin, who is the University Medal winner for undergraduate studies. Feiyue receives her Masters in Advanced Computing today, while Edmund will be graduating with a double degree comprised of Engineering and Advanced Computing (Hons).
Feiyue told us that three of her four semesters were impacted by the pandemic, and two were entirely remote. She is grateful to her lecturers and College staff for going above and beyond to support her and her studies.
Her parents in Jinan, Shandong province, China are watching the livestream today, as well as her sister who is studying medicine at the University of California, Irvine. Feiyue said that she had been insecure about her English language skills, and doubted her ability to succeed in Australia and at ANU. But having been recognised in this way, she says the lesson that she takes is never to doubt herself and to apply herself even when she does have doubts.
Feiyue’s thesis investigated user interfaces for augmented reality and was praised for innovative methodology employing virtual reality to conduct focus group research. She has already begun working remotely for Google as a software engineer. And tomorrow, she will finish packing and head off to Sydney to join them in person.
Edmund is currently hiking on the Larapinta trail and will not attend ceremonies today. His honours project looked at the “theoretical and experimental analysis of non-smooth functions in optimisation of machine learning models, including a variant of deep learning known as deep declarative networks.”
He said the new Hanna Neumann building common areas, especially the Co-Lab, became the locus of his university life. “Throughout my university experience I constantly completed inter-disciplinary work, expanding my education,” he said.
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Congratulations to all our graduates! What a wonderful day of celebration it has been. We hope we have changed you for the better as much as YOU have changed us for the better. @ourANU @ANUAlumni #ANUgraduation pic.twitter.com/xVl8xk7qpJ
— Engineering & Computer Science at ANU (@anucecs) July 15, 2022