SIGCOMM Doctoral Dissertation Award

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

Recent Awards

2024:
Udit Paul (Towards Bridging the Divide: Enhancing Understanding of Digital Inequity) for fundamental contributions to internet measurement and broadband policy, including tools and methodologies to understand digital inequity, and datasets on internet availability and affordability.

Runner-ups:

Bruce Spang (Making Video Traffic a Friendlier Internet Neighbor) for devising Sammy, the first algorithm for application-informed pacing, making video traffic friendlier to neighboring traffic without reducing QoE.

Venkat Arun (Verifying the Performance of Network Control Algorithms) for building networked systems with provable performance guarantees, including Copa, a practical and widely deployed end-to-end congestion control algorithm that maintains high utilization with low queuing delay.

The committee: Jon Crowcroft (University of Cambridge, chair), Georgios Smaragdakis (Delft University of Technology), Michael Schapira (Hebrew University of Jerusalem).

2023:
Kevin Bock (Automating the Discovery of Censorship Evasion Strategies).
Runner-up: Siva Kakaria (Formal Methods for a Robust Domain Name System)

2020:
Yuliang Li (Hardware-Software Codesign for High-Performance Cloud Networks) for innovations that enable improved performance and robustness of cloud networks through hardware and software codesign, including closing the loop of telemetry and control functions, and identifying the best division of labor between programmable switches, NICs, hosts, and the controller.
Honorable Mention: Ming Liu (Building Distributed Systems Using Programmable Networks) for identifying and enabling novel uses of programmable network devices in data centers, including an in-network computing solution for accelerating distributed applications, and a microservice execution platform running on SmartNIC-accelerated servers.
The committee: Jorjeta Jetcheva (San Jose State University, chair), Kate Lin (National Chiao Tung University), David Maltz (Microsoft), and Peter Steenkiste (Carnegie Mellon University).

2019: Deepak Vasisht (Towards Realizing the Internet-of-Things Vision: In-body, Homes, and Farms) for visionary research on internet-of-things services with concrete impact solving human-critical problems in different application areas including in-body, homes, and agriculture.
Mina Tahmasbi Arashloo (Stateful Programming of High-Speed Network Hardware) for pioneering the idea of raising the level of programming abstraction, and for proposing a new architecture for programming network transport protocols in FPGAs and a new language and compiler system for developing stateful applications for software-defined networks.

The committee: Christophe Diot (Google, chair), Jim Kurose (UMass Amherst), Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin), Catherine Rosenberg (University of Waterloo), and Geoff Voelker (UC San Diego).

2018: Ryan Beckett (Network Control Plane Synthesis And Verification) for pioneering contributions in extending the field of network control plane verification and synthesis.
Honorable mention: Arpit Gupta (Flexible and Scalable Systems for Network Management) for impactful work on Software Defined Internet Exchange Point design and implementation.

The committee: John W. Byers (Boston University), Dejan Kostic (KTH), Nikolaos Laoutaris (IMDEA, chair), Anees Shaikh (Google), and Steve Uhlig (Queen Mary University of London).

2017: Anirudh Sivaraman Kaushalram (Designing Fast and Programmable Routers)

The committee: Marco Mellia, T.S. Eugene Ng (chair), Xiaowei Yang, and Haifeng Yu

2016: The two co-winners are Justine Sherry (Middleboxes as a Cloud Service) and Vamsi Talla (Power, Communication and Sensing Solutions for Energy Constrained Platforms)
 

The committee: Fabián Bustamante, Rodrigo Fonseca, Dave Levin (chair), and Ellen Zegura

2015: Mosharaf Chowdhury (Coflow: A Networking Abstraction for Distributed Data-Parallel Applications)

The committee: Ratul Mahajan, Dina Papagiannaki, Laurent Vanbever (chair), and Minlan Yu
 

2014: Keith Winstein (Transport Architectures for an Evolving Internet)

The committee: Mark Crovella, Arvind Krishnamurthy, Nikolaos Laoutaris, Alan Mislove, Neil Spring,  Arun Venkataramani

 

2013: Aaron Schulman (Observing and Improving the Reliability of Internet Last-Mile Links)

2012: Shyamnath Gollakota

2011: Minlan Yu, Scalable Management of Enterprise and Data-Center Networks