The Cheriton School of Computer Science is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural David R. Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award. Established in 2019, this award was created to recognize excellence in computer science doctoral research and writing.
To be eligible, doctoral students must have defended their thesis during 2018. To be considered for the dissertation award, two nomination letters, typically from the student’s doctoral advisor and external examiner, along with a nomination statement, needed to be submitted by March 15, 2019 to a selection committee chaired by the School’s Director of Graduate Studies.
First-place winner
Md Faizul Bari, supervised by Professor Raouf Boutaba, received first place for his PhD thesis titled Resource Orchestration in Softwarized Networks, which he defended on September 19, 2018. As the first-place winner, Md Faizul will receive a $1,000 prize.
“All three problems studied in this dissertation are challenging and of practical importance,” wrote external examiner Professor Yashar Ganjali, Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, in his nomination letter.
“The work does a great job providing a mathematical model to each problem and presents reasonable solutions with great performance. Whenever possible, the presented solutions are compared to optimal results, and extensive evaluation has been presented for all three parts of the work.”
Second-place winners (tie)
Michael Cormier, supervised by Professors Robin Cohen and Richard Mann, received second place for his PhD thesis titled Computer Vision on Web Pages: A Study of Man-Made Images, which he defended on June 29, 2018.
Michael Mior, supervised by Professor Ken Salem, also received second place for his PhD thesis titled Physical Design for Non-relational Data Systems, which he defended on July 30, 2018.
Each second-place winner will receive a $500 prize.
“Congratulations to Md Faizul Bari for winning first place and to Michael Cormier and Michael Mior for tying for second place,” said Professor George Labahn, former Director of Graduate Studies. “All three David R. Cheriton Distinguished Dissertation Award recipients defended exceptional doctoral research projects and all are continuing in academia at universities in Canada and the United States.”
