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The 2017 Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners

The Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award, named in memory of SPEC's long-time president Kaivalya Dixit, honors outstanding dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group.

Based on the high quality of submissions, the SPEC Research Group selection committee decided to recognize two papers — a winner and a runner-up.




Winner:
Aleksandar Milenkoski,
Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg


The winning dissertation — Evaluation of Intrusion Detection Systems for Virtualized Environments — was authored by Aleksandar Milenkoski (right above) of Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Samuel Kounev.

The selection committee appreciated the novel repurposing of performance evaluation tools for characterizing Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). They were also highly impressed with the very principled and structured approach to research and evaluation. In particular, they commend the careful statistical work in the evaluation experiments and the technically deep investigation of IDS issues in virtualized environments.




Runner-Up:
Benjamin Heintz,
University of Minnesota Twin Cities


The runner-up dissertation, titled Optimizing Timeliness, Accuracy, and Cost in Geo-Distributed Data-Intensive Computing Systems, was authored by Benjamin Heintz under the supervision of Prof. Abhishek Chandra at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

The selection committee notes the innovativeness and applicability of the methods and metrics proposed by Dr. Heintz to address the tradeoff between staleness of data and the quantity to be processed. In particular, they appreciate the thorough, meticulous, insightful and methodologically rigorous analyses presented in the dissertation.