EuroSys Roger Needham PhD Award

Prize donated by Microsoft Research Cambridge

EuroSys, the European Chapter of ACM SIGOPS, has established an annual prize to be awarded to a PhD student from a European University whose thesis is regarded to be an exceptional, innovative contribution to knowledge in the systems area. "Systems" is interpreted broadly, and includes operating systems, distributed systems, real-time systems, systems aspects of databases, language runtimes, embedded systems, computer networks, etc. The winner will receive €2000, which will be awarded at the EuroSys conference; the winner will be invited to deliver a short presentation based on their thesis. The prize is donated by Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Criteria for selection are the overall contribution to systems research in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, scientific rigor, quality of the presentation and potential for practical application.

Nominations can only be made by a student's supervisor(s) or head of department. A nomination should include:

A nomination letter, stating the name of the student, the title of the thesis, the institution where the PhD was defended, and the date of the defense.
A 1-page report that outlines how the thesis makes an outstanding contribution to the discipline.
A 1-page extended abstract of the thesis.
The name and contact details of an external expert reviewer. The reviewer should be from a different institution to the student, should be independent of the supervision and examining of the thesis, and should have indicated that they are willing to provide a review.
The PhD thesis itself.
If the thesis is written in language other than English, it may be accompanied by publications, in English, describing the same research as the thesis.

The 2011 EuroSys Roger Needham PhD award is open to PhD theses that have been defended after 1 September 2009. Ordinarily, only one nomination would be expected from any supervisor. In exceptional cases, when multiple nominations seem appropriate, please contact the review committee chair. If the number of suitable nominations is insufficient, the committee may decide to defer its decision and carry nominations forward to the following year. Should there be several outstanding submissions, the committee may split the award between them.

Nominations are welcome at any time before the final submission deadline. Nominations, or questions about the application process, should be sent by e-mail to:

eurosys_phd_prize _at_ eurosys.org

Important dates:

Submission deadline:		30 November 2010
Recipient(s) selected:		15 March 2011
EuroSys conference:		10-13 April 2011

Review committee:

Eduard Ayguadé		UPC & BSC-CNS
Ozalp Babaoglu		Università di Bologna
Frank Bellosa		Universität Karlsruhe (TH)
Paulo Ferreira (chair)		INESC ID / Technical University of Lisbon
Rachid Guerraoui		EPFL
Hermann Haertig		Technical Univerisity of Dresden
Tim Harris		Microsoft Research Cambridge
Gilles Muller		INRIA / Lip6
Morris Sloman		Imperial College of London
Joe Sventek		University of Glasgow
Peter Triantafillou		University of Patras
Paulo Veríssimo		Universidade de Lisboa

Past recipients:

The winner of the 2010 Roger Needham Award is Dr. Willem de Bruijn for his doctoral thesis Adaptive Operating System Design for High Throughput I/O. The award was given at a ceremony in Paris, France on April 15th 2010.

The winner of the 2009 Roger Needham Award is Dr. Jacob Gorm Hansen, currently working with VMware. More information on the recipient, including two press releases can now be found in our Press page.

The winner of the 2008 Roger Needham Award is Dr. Adam Dunkels, currently a senior scientist at SICS. His thesis title is Programming Memory-Constrained Networked Embedded Systems. More information on the recipient, including two press releases can now be found in our News page.

The winner of the 2007 Roger Needham Award is Nick Cook of the University of Newcastle, UK. His thesis title is Middleware Support for Non-repudiable Business-to-Business Interactions. The prize committee comments:
Nick Cook's thesis is a significant contribution to the area of systems research. He has developed two forms of non-repudiation protocol as middleware components. One form is client-server. The other form is for information shared among a group and owned by no one party. Consensus must be achieved before data is updated. He has built two applications on top of the middleware. The jury particularly appreciated the systems approach. Nick identified, applied and where necessary extended fundamental work on security protocols. He furthermore paid a lot of attention to the software engineering aspects such as separation of concern and flexiility, to arrive to a practical system that is both largely applicable and useful.

The winner of the 2006 Roger Needham Award is Oliver Heckmann of TU Darmstadt. His thesis title is A System-oriented Approach to Efficiency and Quality of Service for Internet Service Providers. The prize committee comments:
Oliver Heckman's thesis is a significant contribution to the area of Internet performance evaluation. It addresses the provision of performance guarantees over multiple service-provider hops subject to efficiency considerations, investigates the effectiveness of overprovisioning, and evaluates optimisation of cost, reliability and QoS for the inter-ISP case. The thesis follows a whole-systems integrated approach. It is novel, scientifically relevant and timely.

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