PhD candidates granted prestigious Microsoft PhD Fellowship

PhD candidates Xu Chu (Ihab Ilyas, Database Research) and Laura Inozemtseva (Reid Holmes, Software Architecture), have been invited to join the prestigious Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship Program. 

The Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship is a two-year fellowship program for outstanding PhD students nominated by their universities. Of the 12 candidates granted a position, Chu and Inozemtseva are the only two Canadians.

"The presence of two of our graduate students among a cohort of extraordinary researchers speaks to the opportunities our students are exposed to," explained associate dean, research and Cheriton School of Computer Science professor Tamer Özsu. "Both Laura and Xu have repeatedly proven themselves worthy of such an accolade through quality of research, awards, and presentations at prestigious conferences. Since its inception in 2008, only three Canadians have been given this award and it is encouraging to see that two of those three have come from the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science."

Microsoft aims to collaborate with top academic researchers and institutions in hopes of developing technologies that encourage data-intensive scientific research which helps solve urgent global challenges. The details of the award include the opportunity to complete one salaried internship at the company during the year following the award.

Both Chu and Inozemtseva are both honoured to have received the award and the opportunity. 

"I'm very excited about receiving this award and look forward to my internship at Microsoft Research, where I will have the opportunity to work with an excellent team of empirical software engineering researchers," said Inozemtseva. 

Chu echoed her thoughts. "I am very excited about receiving such prestigious award. It feels great that my work is recognized by Microsoft Research."

During the last two years, Chu's contributions in the are of data cleaning and automatic discovery of integrity constraints constitute the state of the art in the field, and were published and demonstrated in top data management research venues such as the Very Large Data Bases International Conference and the International Conference on Data Engineering, with multiple other submissions under review. Data cleaning and quality is gaining increasing importance in the Big Data era. With huge amount of collected data from various sources, reassigning about the sanity and extracting the highest value of this data are crucial tasks in enabling business intelligence and reliable data analytics.

Inozemtseva has been equally as busy having been recently granted the Martin Murray Prize for authoring or co-authoring an outstanding research paper. Since starting her PhD, Laura has won a number of scholarships including the Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the David R. Cheriton Graduate Scholarship. She has received two ACM distinguished paper awards for her works "Coverage Is Not Strongly Correlated With Test Suite Effectiveness" and "Are Mutants a Valid Substitute for Real Faults in Software Testing?” These papers were published at ICSE and FSE, the top two conferences in software engineering.

Congratulations to both.