EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award 2009
Prize donated by Microsoft Research Cambridge
EuroSys, the European Chapter of ACM 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 2009 award will be judged by a committee appointed by EuroSys. The prize is donated by Microsoft Research Cambridge. The winner will receive 2000 euros, which will be awarded at the EuroSys conference; the winner will be invited to deliver a short presentation based on the thesis.
Theses may be nominated only by the student's PhD supervisor(s). The supervisor(s) should send the following material to the address below:
- 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 primary author.
- The PhD thesis.
- If the thesis is written in language other than English, it may be accompanied by publications in English, describing the same research as the 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. 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 its decision, in which case nominations are automatically carried forward to the following year, and the nomination period extended by a year. Should the quality of the submitted PhDs be insufficient, the committee may decide to not award the prize. Should there be several outstanding submissions, the committee may split the award between them.
Nomination material are to be sent, by email to:
eurosys_phd_prize _at_ cs.kuleuven.ac.be. www.eurosys.org
The winner of the 2008 Roger Needham Award is Dr. Adam Dunkels, currently a senior scientist at SICS. His thesis title is Programming Memory-Constrained Networked Embedded Systems. More information on the recipient, including two press releases can now be found in our News page.
The winner of the 2007 Roger Needham Award is Nick Cook of the University of Newcastle, UK. His thesis title is Middleware Support for Non-repudiable Business-to-Business Interactions. The prize committee comments:
Nick Cook's thesis is a significant contribution to the area of systems research. He has developed two forms of non-repudiation protocol as middleware components. One form is client-server. The other form is for information shared among a group and owned by no one party. Consensus must be achieved before data is updated. He has built two applications on top of the middleware. The jury particularly appreciated the systems approach. Nick identified, applied and where necessary extended fundamental work on security protocols. He furthermore paid a lot of attention to the software engineering aspects such as separation of concern and flexiility, to arrive to a practical system that is both largely applicable and useful.
The winner of the 2006 Roger Needham Award is Oliver Heckmann of TU Darmstadt. His thesis title is A System-oriented Approach to Efficiency and Quality of Service for Internet Service Providers. The prize committee comments:
Oliver Heckman's thesis is a significant contribution to the area of Internet performance evaluation. It addresses the provision of performance guarantees over multiple service-provider hops subject to efficiency considerations, investigates the effectiveness of overprovisioning, and evaluates optimisation of cost, reliability and QoS for the inter-ISP case. The thesis follows a whole-systems integrated approach. It is novel, scientifically relevant and timely.
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