Francesco Silvestri won the 2021 ACM SIGMOD Research Highlight Award with the paper “M. Aumüller, R. Pagh and F. Silvestri. Fair Near Neighbor Search: Independent Range Sampling in High Dimensions. In Proc. of ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS), 2020”. The SIGMOD Research Highlight Award aims to showcase a set of research projects that exemplify core database research. In particular, these projects address an important problem, represent a definitive milestone in solving the problem, and have the potential of significant impact.

Stefano Ghidoni received the "Challenge winner" award for the "Digital Learning Innovation" challenge at DigiEduHack 2020, won with the project "DALP - Digitally Augmented Learning Productivity", organized by Franco Bonollo (DTG) with the participation of Carlo Mariconda (DM), Lisa Biasetto (DTG) and Paolo Ferro (DTG).

Tommaso Boccato (former master student, DEI now cooperating with the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab (CCNL), Department of General Psychology) with Stefano Ghidoni received the best paper award at the Sixteenth International Conference on Autonomic and Autonomous Systems (ICAS 2020) for the paper "In the Depths of Hyponymy: A Step Towards Lifelong Learning", co-authored with Timothy Patten and Markus Vincze, TU Wien.

Alessandro Fabris won the "IP&M 2020 Ph.D. Paper Award” for the article Fabris, A., Purpura, A., Silvello, G., & Susto, G. A. (2020). Gender stereotype reinforcement: Measuring the gender bias conveyed by ranking algorithms. Information Processing & Management, 57(6), 102377 (open access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457320308724).