Digital Healthcare Award for Bachelor Thesis in Berlin, April 9, 2025

04/23/2025

We are thrilled to share that Peiyao Mao, a student from xAILab Bamberg, has been awarded third place in the prestigious DMEA Sparks Award, an honor celebrating exceptional student contributions to the future of digital healthcare.

The DMEA Sparks Award, part of Europe’s leading digital health event DMEA, recognizes outstanding bachelor’s and master’s theses that introduce impactful solutions to advance healthcare digitalization. This year the event had over 20,500 participants, 900 exhibitors, and 400 speakers from across Germany and around the globe. Peiyao earned this recognition for her bachelor’s thesis titled: “Exploring and Evaluating Deep Hashing Methods within Vision Foundation Model Feature Spaces for Similarity Search and Privacy Preservation.” In today’s digital world, images play a central role in everything from social media to medical diagnostics. Peiyao's thesis explores how Vision Transformer (ViT) combined with hashing techniques can be used to perform efficient image similarity searches while introducing privacy constraints. Her work enables the transformation of image data into compact, semantically rich hash codes that protect sensitive personal information without sacrificing utility. You can watch Peiyao’s presentation of her project on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PJqm5QaMXE&t=14s to learn more about her work. To discover more about the DMEA Sparks Award and explore the work of the other inspiring finalists, check out the official DMEA blogpost https://www.dmea.de/en/news-blog/dmea-sparks-award-for-innovative-bachelor's-and-master's-theses.html. You can also view all finalist project pitches on DMEA’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@DMEA-Health.