SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in Computer Networking and Data Communication

Description

This annual award was created by SIGCOMM in 2011, and will recognize excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of computer networking and data communication. The SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award winner and up to two runners-up will be recognized at the ACM SIGCOMM conference. The award winner will receive a plaque, a $1,500 honorarium and a complimentary registration to the following year’s ACM SIGCOMM Conference.  The runners-up each will receive a plaque.

Eligibility

Nominations are limited to one doctoral dissertation per department.

The final dissertation defense should take place at the nominee’s host institution during the 12 months before the submission deadline (see below).

Nominations are due November 30, 2012.  Please see http://sigcomm.org/awards/dissertation for details.

The SIGCOMM Executive Committee is inviting potential hosts of the SIGCOMM 2014 conference to submit proposals. Details of the proposal process are posted at http://www.sigcomm.org/conference-planning/sigcomm-planning/site-proposa... . Proposals should be submitted to Jaudelice de Oliveira, the Conference Coordinator, no later than October 31, 2012. Based on the three-year rotation schedule, the preference for 2014 is for proposals from North America.

The winner of the 2012 Test-of-Time Paper award is:

"Tussle in cyberspace: defining tomorrow's internet", by David Clark, Karen Sollins, John Wroclawski and Bob Braden, Proc. ACM SIGCOMM 2002.

SIGCOMM is ACM's forum for discussing communications and computer networks. SIGCOMM members include scientists, engineers, educators and students. They study all aspects of computer communications and networks: analysis, technical design, engineering, measurement and management. In recognition of the international nature of our field, and the resource constraints that can stifle the exchange of ideas, the SIGCOMM Executive Committee has set aside funds to support community projects that will contribute to advancing the field of communications and computer networks and cooperation within the SIG.

• Improving and maintaining software that is vital to the community. The SIGCOMM community uses research-enabling software that has often been developed by researchers or PhD students for specific projects, but is not actively maintained. A community project could focus on some widely used software (e.g., simulation tool, software library, measurement tool) and provide maintenance, documentation and support for this software so that it can be easily used by more researchers.
• Collecting datasets that are useful for the community. Many SIGCOMM researchers rely on datasets to evaluate the performance of proposed techniques or understand the behavior of protocols or applications. Many of these datasets have been collected by individual researchers and reside on researcher's homepages that disappear after a few years. A community project could collect some of these datasets, or create new ones, and provide the necessary metadata that details the dataset and its known limitations and store them on publicly accessible servers or add them to existing public collections.
• Understanding the SIGCOMM community and its evolution. Like many communities, the SIGCOMM community evolves. Although SIGCOMM members are skilled at measuring the Internet, we do not have quantitative data about the evolution of our community, e.g., the number of faculty, PhD students or researchers who consider themselves to be network researcher or the job opportunities for graduates. A community project could develop surveys like the Taulbee survey in the United States that could allow us to better understand who are SIGCOMM members and what are their needs.
• Educational material. Many SIGCOMM members develop various types of educational material for the courses they teach, such as slides, software, exercises, projects, or exams. This educational material is often of very good quality, but only used by one class at one university. An educational project could build on existing educational material and expand it so that it can be easily re-used by other teachers.
• SIGCOMM video channel. Tutorials have sometimes been offered in parallel with SIGCOMM conferences. Given the availability of video streaming platforms such as ACM's Digital Library, YouTube or Vimeo, it is now possible to widely disseminate presentations or long tutorials by using these platforms. However, this often requires a good quality video production. A community project could assemble a set of tutorials or long presentations, record them and disseminate the results to the entire SIGCOMM community.
• Training students by reproducing research results. There are regularly discussions about the reproducibility of research results generated within our community. Reproducing previous research results is important but reproducing some results, e.g., measurements or systems results, can take a lot of time. A community project could organize a summer school or a long workshop where students would reproduce previous but important research results. This activity could allow the community to verify whether some past assumptions that were based on old measurements are still valid.
•  Database of networking courses. SIGCOMM members working in universities teach courses on a broad range of topics. Unfortunately, the teaching material developed for these courses is hidden on university web sites and difficult to find. A community project could categorize these courses and build a web site that presents all these courses in an easily accessible way. 
• ...

Call for proposals

The SIGCOMM Executive Committee will evaluate all SIGCOMM community project proposals. The current list of SIGCOMM officers may be found on the SIGCOMM web site : http://www.sigcomm.org/about/people/

The next submission deadline in January 20th, 2013.

Funding Criteria

• The project must be relevant to and provide value to a large number of SIGCOMM members.
•  The project must agree to disseminate its results to the community, e.g., via a poster presentation at one of the SIGCOMM-sponsored conference and/or an article in CCR. Furthermore, a brief report must be sent to the SIGCOMM EC at the end of the project.
• The funding must be for a single activity, although the activity can take place over a number of years. If the activity is the beginning of what will become an on-going event, the project must include a plan for obtaining continued funding from sources other than SIGCOMM.
• For events that span multiple years, funding may be only for the current year and funding for future years must be requested annually and cannot be guaranteed.
• The total budget requested from SIGCOMM cannot exceed 20,000 US$. SIGCOMM expects any overhead charged by universities or other organizations to be very low.

Proposals

• Title: What is the project to be called?
• Subject matter: What is the purpose of this project?
• People: Who speaks for, and take responsibility for this project? Who else is on the team? What are their qualifications to do this project? What is your expectation of success?
• Budget: What are the major costs for this project ?
• Duration: Will this project need on-going, continual funding? If so, how many years of seed money are being sought, and what is the plan for continuing funding?
• Schedule: When will the project start and end?
• Relevance: What SIGCOMM members are this project relevant to? Do they have similar projects already underway? How will they be involved?
• Potential value: What is the potential value of the proposed project to SIGCOMM members?
• Deliverables: What will be the outcome of the project?
• Delivery vehicle: Who is the audience for this outcome? How will these people be informed of the outcome? Where applicable, how will they get access to the results or products? (Funded community projects are highly encouraged to disseminate the results of the project to the SIGCOMM community by presenting a poster at a SIGCOMM sponsored conference and/or submitting a CCR editorial describing the project results.)
• Additional funding: Have you considered other sources of funding? Will someone match SIGCOMM funding?
• Dependency: What other things does the successful completion of this project depend upon?
• Previous work: What work has already been done in this area and how will this project build on it?