SIGCOMM Rising Star Award Winners

Each year, ACM SIGCOMM presents a "Rising Star" Award, recognizing a young researcher - an individual within 10 years of receiving their highest university degree - who has made outstanding research contributions to the field of communication networks during this early part of her or his career. Depth, impact, and novelty of the researcher's contributions will be key criteria upon which the Rising Star award committee evaluates the nominees. Also of particular interest are strong research contributions made independently from the nominee's PhD advisor.

• 2024: Xin Jin (Peking University)

 The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in the area of software-defined networking, programmable networks, and network support for distributed systems such as large-scale storage systems. The 2024 Rising Star Award Committee members were: Lixin Gao (UMass Amherst), Ramana Kompella (Cisco Research), Cristel Pelsser (UC Louvain), K. K. Ramakrishnan (U. California, Riverside), and chair Zhi-Li Zhang (University of Minnesota). 

• 2023: Ravi Netravali (Princeton)
  This award is in recognition of Ravi's contributions in greatly improving the performance of a wide range of networked systems and distributed applications by using tools from machine learning and program analysis. The rising star award committee was comprised of Aruna Balasubramanian (Stony Brook), David Choffnes (Northeastern), Anja Feldmann (Max Planck Institute), Venkat Padmanabhan (Microsoft Research), and Ramesh K. Sitaraman (UMass Amherst and Akamai, Chair).

• 2022: Manya Ghobadi (MIT)
  This award is in recognition of Manya's outstanding research contributions, early in her career, in developing novel architectures for reconfigurable fiber optical networks and improving machine learning applications with reconfigurable and programmable networks. The rising star award committee included Nick Feamster (Univ. of Chicago), Alan Mislove (Northeastern Univ.), Neil Spring (Meta), and Xiaowei Yang (Duke Univ., chair).

• 2021: Laurent Vanbever (ETH Zurich)
  The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, toward improving the flexibility, correctness, and security of Internet routing. The rising star award committee comprised Alex Snoeren (UCSD, chair), Paul Barford (WISC), Brad Karp (UCL), and Renata Teixeira (Inria).

• 2020: Keith Winstein (Stanford University)
  The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions in the areas of computer-generated robust networking algorithms such as congestion control. His innovative and out-of-the-box approaches, supporting the networking community through open datasets and open source software, have impacted academia, industry and society. The rising star award committee comprised Sharad Agarwal (MSR, chair), Morley Mao (University of Michigan), Matt Roughan (University of Adelaide), and Hakim Weatherspoon (Cornell University).

• 2019: Ethan Katz-Bassett (Columbia University)
  The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in improving the reliability and performance of Internet services. His practical and principled measurement-driven approach has led to innovative high-impact contributions across academia and industry. The rising star award committee comprised Lixin Gao (University of Massachusetts, Amherst), Thomas Karagiannis (MSR Cambridge, chair), Craig Partridge (Colorado State University), Lili Qiu (University of Texas at Austin).

• 2018: Nate Foster (Cornell University)
  The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, to programmable networks and network verification. His interdisciplinary work brings techniques from programming languages to bear on fundamental networking problems. The rising star award committee, comprised of Vyas Sekar (CMU), Alex Snoeren (UCSD) Jia Wang (AT&T, chair), and Walter Willinger (Niksun).

• 2017: Mohammadreza Alizadeh Attar (MIT)
  The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in the area of large scale datacenter network architectures and protocols. The rising star award committee comprised of Sujata Banerjee (VMWare Research), Sylvia Ratnasamy (UC Berkeley), Peter Steenkiste (CMU), and Balachander Krishnamurthy (AT&T Research).

• 2016: Vyas Sekar (Carnegie Mellon University)
  The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in the areas of network middleboxes, video quality of experience, and network security. The Rising Star Award committee was composed of Serge Fdida, Dina Papagiannaki, Craig Patridge, Patrick Thiran, Tilman Wolf (chair).

• 2015: Brighten Godfrey (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
  The award to Brighten Godfrey is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in network architecture. His work has brought a synergy of algorithmic and systems insights to make significant contributions in problems such as pathlet routing, data center architectures, and network verification. (committee KC Claffy, Constantine Dovrolis (chair), Sue Moon, Patrick Thiran)

• 2014: Aditya Akella (UW-Madison)
  The award is in recognition of fundamental contributions in the areas of network management and content distribution, impacting technology in both areas. The Rising Star Award committee was composed of Fabian Bustamante, Jon Crowcroft, Anja Feldmann, Dina Papagiannaki, and Alex Snoeren.

• 2013: Sachin Katti (Stanford University)
  The award is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in wireless communications and networking. His approach to cross-layer wireless design brings together computer networking, signal processing and information theory to solve long-standing problems in wireless networks. Highlights of his research contributions include a practical approach to achieve full-duplex radios (Mobicom'10, MOBICOM'11, SIGCOMM'13) and rateless network design for practical adapation of sender transmission rate (SIGCOMM'11, MOBICOM'12). To quote from his nomination "Sachin Katti’s research has transformed the way we think about wireless communications."

• 2012: Teemu Koponen (VMware)
  This award to Teemu Koponen is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, on Information Centric Networking, Accountable Internetworking, and Software Defined Networking. His architectural ideas are deep, have improved practice, and crucially, he has put in significant effort in figuring out how to actually make them happen.

• 2011: Sylvia Ratnasamy (UC Berkeley)
  The award to Sylvia Ratnasamy is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in her career, in content addressable networks, peer-to-peer and overlay networks, and the realization of practical software routers.

• 2010: Nick Feamster (Georgia Tech)
  The award to Nick Feamster is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in network operations and security. His ongoing work with network operators has resulted in innovative and practical systems for making networks more secure, more available, and easier to manage.

• 2009: Ratul Mahajan (Microsoft Research)
  The award to Ratul Mahajan is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, in network management and wireless communication, where his measurement driven approach has culminated in innovative and practically adopted systems.

• 2008: Konstantina (Dina) Papagiannaki (Intel Research, USA)
  The award to Konstantina Papagiannaki is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in her career, on the role of measurements for the development of efficient algorithms in the design, planning, and management of wired and wireless IP networks.

The SIGCOMM Rising Star award was initiated by the CoNEXT steering committee, then adopted by SIGCOMM. Its first two recipients were awarded the "CoNEXT Rising Star Award."

• 2007: Ion Stoica (UC Berkeley, USA)
  The award to Ion Stoica is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, on advances in Internet architecture, overlay networks and practical distributed systems.

• 2006: Matthias Grossglauser (EPFL, Switzerland)
  The award to Matthias Grossglauser is in recognition of outstanding research contributions, early in his career, on modeling and design of wired and mobile networks and architectures.