EuroSys Roger Needham Award

EuroSys, the European Chapter of SIGOPS, has established an annual prize to be awarded to a PhD student from a European University whose thesis is regarded to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the systems area. The "Systems" area of computer science is the study of software platforms supporting a large spectrum of applications. It includes operating systems, distributed systems, real-time systems, systems aspects of databases, language runtimes, embedded systems, computer networks etc., and intersects a large number of application areas.

The award will be judged by a committee appointed by EuroSys. The prize is donated by Microsoft Research Cambridge. The winner will receive €2000, which will be awarded at the EuroSys conference, where the winner be invited to deliver a short presentation based on the thesis.

Theses should be nominated for the award by the student's PhD supervisor(s). In order to nominate a thesis, the supervisor(s) should submit

• a nomination letter, stating the name of the student, the title of the thesis, the institution where the PhD was defended, the date of the defense, etc.,
• a report that outlines in what way the thesis makes an outstanding contribution to the discipline
• an extended abstract of the thesis
• a list of publications derived from research carried out for the doctoral degree and of which the candidate is the sole or senior author.
• the PhD thesis.

Criteria for selection of the prize winner are the overall contribution to systems research in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, scientific rigor, quality of the presentation and potential for practical application.

In case a thesis is written in another language than English, it may be accompanied by publications in English, describing the same research as that described in the thesis.

The PhD Prize Committee can decide to extend the committee with additional members, depending on the number and topics of the PhD's being nominated. If the number of nominations is insufficient, the committee may decide to defer the award; in this case nominations are automatically carried forward to the following year, and the nomination period extended by a year.

Should the quality of the submitted PhD's be insufficient, the committee has the right not to award the prize. Also, should there be two or more excellent submissions, the committee has the right to split the award between them.

eurosys_phd_prize _at _ cs.kuleuven.ac.be