Distributed Computing Dissertation Award - Call for Nominations

(Apologies for crosspostings.)


Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award 2013 - Call
for Nominations
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The Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award was
created in 2012
to acknowledge and promote outstanding research by doctoral (Ph.D.) students
on the
principles of Distributed Computing.

Eligibility

- A nominated dissertation must have been successfully defended in the
period January
1st, 2011 through December 31st, 2012.
- If the advisor of the dissertation is in the core committee (see below),
it cannot be
nominated, but will be eligible for an additional year.
- The dissertation must be in English: either originally written in English,
or translated.
- The main topic of the dissertation must be on the principles of
Distributed Computing.
(For a possible indication of what it is meant by this term, see for example
the Call
for Papers of DISC and PODC.)

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:

- Contact details (affiliation and email addresses) of the advisor and the
doctoral student.
- 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.
- A one page justification letter.
- The following four lists of work (co)authored by the candidate:
+ 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.
+ Publications that are cited in the thesis, but do not contain material
that also appears
in the thesis.
+ 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 thesis and the parts that are not contained in the thesis.
+ Those parts of the thesis which are not included in the other lists.
- A list of awards the student received for the thesis and/or publications
related to the
thesis.
- One copy of the dissertation in electronic form (preferably in pdf).
- A separate copy of the abstract in electronic form (either as pdf or plain
text).

All of the above must be submitted to Shay Kutten via email by April 30,
2013.

Award Committee and Review Process

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

Marcos K. Aguilera, Microsoft Research
Rachid Guerraoui, EPFL
Shay Kutten, Technion (Chair)
Alessandro Panconesi, Sapienza

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

- This year the award will be presented at PODC.
- The winning dissertation will receive a plaque and a prize of 1000 USD.
- The committee reserves the right to split or decline to give the award.