The EuroSys conference report blog

We are delighted to announce that the winners of the 2008 EuroSys Student Travel Grant awards are Horatiu Jula from EPFL and Derek Murray from Cambridge University. The applications from these two candidates were outstanding, and it was not an easy task to select the two winners from an extremely strong set of entries. We wish to thank all the applicants for entering the competition, and we hope they enjoyed writing the pieces about their research and their favorite paper from previous OSDI proceedings as much as we enjoyed reading them.

From the winning entries, Horatio chose “Securing Software by Enforcing Data-flow Integrity” (Castro et al, OSDI 2006), calling the technique to prevent software attacks such as buffer overflows “elegant and effective” and contrasting with “XFI: Software Guards for System Address Spaces” (Erlingsson et al, OSDI 2006). Derek selected “MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters” (Dean & Ghemawat, OSDI 2004) which he says is “particularly interesting because it describes a technique and a system that successfully operates at massive scale”, and he observes that “its publication heralded the start of a trend”. He hopes to see more papers in the future that deal with the challenge of massive-scale data sets, although he would also like “more emphasis on comparative evaluation”.

Horatiu and Derek will be attending the OSDI 2008 conference from December 8th to December 10th, and will report on the conference in this blog. If you cannot attend OSDI, or if you will attend the conference and want to know Horatiu and Derek’s thoughts, stay tuned!