2022 Dissertation Award nominations

Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award
awarded jointly by
ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing
EATCS Symposium on Distributed Computing

Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award 2022

Call for Nominations

We are soliciting nominations for the 2022 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award. The award will be presented at the 36th Int. Symposium on Distributed Computing (DISC 2022) October 2022 in Augusta GA, US.

Submission link: https://podc-dda22.hotcrp.com/paper/new
Information about the award here.

Submission Guidelines

Please nominate excellent dissertations in the area of Distributed Computing that were successfully defended (or, in lieu of a defense, obtained final approval) in the period January 1st, 2020 through December 31st, 2021.

Detailed submission guidelines can be found at the bottom of the current page and of the award page.

Submission deadline: March 31st, 2022
Submission link: https://podc-dda22.hotcrp.com/paper/new

Award Committee

Yehuda Afek, Tel-Aviv University (chair)
Keren Censor-Hillel, Technion
Seth Gilbert, National University of Singapore
Gadi Taubenfeld, Reichman University

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to Yehuda Afek (yehuda.afek@gmail.com)

Nomination and Submission

A one-page nomination letter must be submitted by the thesis advisor. The nomination should highlight the dissertation’s contributions and justify why the dissertation is worthy of the award.

Submission Checklist

A nomination must include:

  1. Contact details (affiliation and email addresses) of the advisor and the doctoral student.
  2. A formal document from the student’s department/institution/organization verifying the date that the dissertation was successfully defended (a scanned version is acceptable for the submission, but the original document might be required at a later stage of the evaluation). If not indicated by the document, also state the period of time the student was enrolled in the doctoral program.
  3. A one page justification letter.
  4. The following four lists of work (co)authored by the candidate:
    1. Publications that contain material from the thesis, detailing what material was taken from which part of the thesis and the parts that are not contained in the thesis.
    2. Publications that are cited in the thesis, but do not contain material that also appears in the thesis.
    3. Papers currently under review, including journal submissions of previously published work, that contain material from the thesis, detailing what material was taken from which part of the thesis and the parts that are not contained in the thesis.
    4. Those parts of the thesis which are not included in the other lists.
  5. A list of awards the student received for the thesis and/or publications related to the thesis.
  6. One copy of the dissertation in electronic form (preferably in pdf).
  7. A separate copy of the abstract in electronic form (either as pdf or plain text).

Review Process

The committee will consist of four core members and a number of ad-hoc members, selected as described below. The review process will consist of two stages:

The first selection phase, carried out by the core members, will be based on the nomination letters and publication lists. At the end of this phase, a short list of dissertations to be considered in the second round will be compiled.

Based on the short list, the four core members will identify experts on the topics of the dissertations and invite them to serve as additional (ad hoc) members of the committee. The committee should include sufficiently many members to allow each dissertation to be reviewed by three members without requiring any member to review more than two dissertations.

Evaluation Criteria

The nominated dissertations will be reviewed for technical depth and significance of the research contributions in the area of Distributed Computing, potential impact on theory and practice, and quality of presentation/writing, including thoroughness of description of related work and understandability of algorithms and proofs.

Award

  • The award presentation will alternate between DISC (even years) and PODC (odd years).
  • The winning dissertation will receive a plaque and a monetary prize.
  • The committee reserves the right to split or decline to give the award.
  • The committee can give Honorable Mentions to up to two non-winning dissertations meriting special recognition (or one Honorable Mention in case the award is split).