The Best Teacher Award 2024
The “Best Teacher Award” was established to recognize the exceptional dedication of motivated and inspiring lecturers who teach in over 2,000 courses at TU Wien each semester. The award is divided into three categories: Best Teacher, Best Lecturer, and Best Gender-Sensitive Teaching. The Best Teacher Award celebrates lecturers who demonstrate outstanding commitment, deliver exceptional teaching, and create a supportive learning environment for their students. This year, the Best Teacher Award at TU Wien is proudly presented to Dr. Astrid Weiss from the Research Unit for Human-Computer Interaction. The course “Introduction to Security” by Mauro Tempesta, Matteo Maffei, Marco Squarcina, and Sebastian Roth was nominated for the Best Lecture Award.
Dr. Astrid Weiss is an Assistant Professor at TU Wien and a member of the Human-Computer Interaction Group at the Institute of Visual Computing and Human-Centered Technology. Her passion lies in exploring how people interact with adaptive technologies in their daily lives and understanding the factors that influence their acceptance or rejection. She is widely regarded as a pioneer in combining empirical social research with robotics.
Throughout her career, Weiss has received several prestigious awards, including the Hertha Firnberg Award (2012) and the Elise Richter Grant (2017) from the FWF Science Fund, both aimed at supporting the academic careers of young female researchers. In 2013, she was recognized as one of the “25 Women You Need to Know in Robotics” by RoboHub, and in 2017, she was a speaker at TEDx TU Wien. In 2018, she was elected as a member of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Before joining TU Wien, Astrid worked with the Vision4Robotics Group at the Automation and Control Institute (ACIN). Prior to that, she was a senior researcher leading an interdisciplinary team at the ICT&S Center at the University of Salzburg, where she focused on “Adaptive Systems.”
Astrid holds a PhD in Sociology and Human-Computer Interaction and a Master’s degree in Sociology, both from the University of Salzburg. In 2022, she achieved another significant milestone by successfully defending her habilitation, earning the venia docendi for Human-Computer Interaction.
