The 2019 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 also publicly recognize a runner-up award winner and two honorable mention
winners.
Award winner: Dr. Guanpeng Li, University of British Columbia
The winning dissertation — Understanding and Modeling Error Propagation in Programs — was authored by by Dr. Guanpeng Li of the University of British Columbia, under the
supervision of Prof. Karthik Pattabiraman. The selection committee was especially impressed
with the intellectual merit, potential impact, quality, and clarity of Dr. Li's dissertation.
Runner-up award: Dr. Bin Nie, College of William & Mary
The runner-up dissertation is titled GPGPU Reliability Analysis: From Applications to
Large Scale Systems, by Dr. Bin Nie under the supervision of Prof. Evgenia Smirni at
the College of William & Mary. The awards committee hailed Dr. Nie's thesis as a perfect
example of bridging the gap between theory and practice.
Honorable mention awards
The selection committee gave honorable mentions to two other works: Hybrid, Job-Aware and
Preemptive Data Center Schedulers by Pamela Delgado from École Polytechnique Fédérale
de Lausanne (EPFL), under the supervision of Prof. Willy Zwaenepoel; and A First-Principles
Approach to Performance, Power, and Energy Models for Contemporary Multi- and Many-Core Processors by Dr. Johannes Hofmann from Friedrich-Alexander Universitat Erlangen-Nurnberg, under the
supervision of Prof. Gerhard Wellein.