The SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in the field of computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general. Nominated dissertations will be evaluated in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, practical relevance, impact, and quality of the presentation.

The winner will receive $1000, which will be awarded at the ICPE 2021 International Conference on Performance Engineering.

Submission Guidelines

A nomination consists of one PDF file less than 20MB that must include the following information in this order:

1. A nomination letter with the name of the student, the title of the dissertation, the institution where the dissertation was defended, and the date of the defense. The nomination letter should outline the outstanding contributions of the dissertation and should not exceed 2 pages (letter size) using 11 point font.
2. A C.V. of the nominee (up to three pages) that clearly marks all publications/technical reports that are included in the dissertation.
3. The dissertation itself, including a one-page extended abstract of the dissertation. If the dissertation is written in language other than English, it may be accompanied by publications, in English, describing the same research as the dissertation.

SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award is open to dissertations that have been defended between October 2019 and September 2020. If there are several outstanding submissions, the committee may split the award between them.

The submission deadline is September 30, 2020. Nominations are welcome at any time before the final submission deadline.

Nominations should be uploaded to EasyChair at URL: 

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=spec2020award

The nomination can be provided by anyone except the thesis author. Typically, it is the thesis advisor or a member of the thesis defense committee, but other people – especially experts in performance evaluation – can do so as well.

List of Topics

The SPEC Research Group promotes research in quantitative system evaluation and analysis both with classical performance metrics – such as response time, throughput, scalability and efficiency, as well as other extra-functional system properties included under the term dependability – such as availability, reliability, and security. Contributions of interest span the design of metrics for system evaluation as well as the development of methodologies, techniques and tools for measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems.

Committees

Selection Committee

• William Knottenbelt (Imperial College London, UK) (Chair)
• Marta Beltran (Rey Juan Carlos University, Spain) [TBC]
• Vittorio Cortellessa (Università degli Studi dell’Aquila, Italy) [TBC]
• Tony Field (Imperial College London, UK) [TBC]
• Andrea Marin (Università Ca' Foscari di Venezia, Italy) 
• John Murphy (University College Dublin, Ireland) [TBC]
• Andrew Rice (University of Cambridge, UK) [TBC]
• Evgenia Smirni (College of William and Mary, VA, USA) 
• Connie Smith (Spe-ed+ Performance Engineering, TX, USA) [TBC]
• Cary Williamson (University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada)
• Katinka Wolter (Free University of Berlin, Germany)

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to nominations at spec dot org

Sponsor: SPEC