/ Research, Studies
Florian Burkhardt receives the Fritz Kutter Prize for his master's thesis.
The computer scientist and DMI graduate Florian Burkhardt was awarded the Fritz Kutter Prize in November 2024 for his master's thesis: "Bone Fragment Reconstruction for Forensic Analysis: A Complete Web Application Integrating Bayesian Shape Modelling and Deep Learning" (supervised by Dr. Marcel Lüthi and Jonathan Aellen).
The Fritz Kutter Prize, endowed by the Fritz Kutter Fund, is awarded annually to recognize outstanding practice-oriented theses in computer science. The prize is given to graduates of Swiss universities and has only been awarded to a graduate of the University of Basel for the second time.
Florian Burkhardt's thesis addresses a challenge in forensic anthropology - the identification of skeletal remains. His research explores how complete femurs can be reconstructed from bone fragments to derive biological profiles. These profiles can help identify unknown individuals.
The web application developed in his thesis enables end users to reconstruct complete bones from bone fragments. To achieve this, multiple independent components developed by the Graphics and Vision Research Group had to be integrated. A standout feature of this application is that it not only predicts the most probable bone reconstruction but also precisely quantifies the uncertainty of the prediction.
The web application has been tested by experts at the Zurich Forensic Science Institute and is set to be further evaluated in a multicenter study this year.
The application is presented in the following video: https://youtu.be/n8tx86UuwFk.