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.