The William Chan Memorial Dissertation Award

William Chan was an exceptional graduate student in our department who was killed in a tragic automobile accident one week after defending his dissertation and a month before joining the faculty at Brown University. His dissertation was posthumously recognized in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award competition in 2000.

Each year the faculty are asked to nominate students whose dissertations from the past academic year show exceptional merit. The winner of the award is selected from that pool of nominees by a small group of faculty.

The winner receives a cash award and an individual plaque. The winner's name is engraved on a plaque on display in the department's main office.

YearAwardeeDissertation Title 

2012

Jon Froehlich Sensing and Feedback of Everyday Activities to Promote Pro-environmental Behaviors
2012 Ethan Katz-Bassett Systems for Improving Internet Availability and Performance

2011

Seth Cooper A Framework for Scientic Discovery through Video Games Winner, 2012 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
2011 Roxana Geambasu Regaining Control over Cloud and Mobile Data 
2009 Prasad Raghavendra Approximating NP-hard Problems--Efficient Algorithms and Their Limits  
2009 Keith Noah Snavely Scene Reconstruction and Visualization from Internet Photo Collection Honorable Mention, 2010 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
2008 Krzysztof Gajos Automatically Generating Personalized User Interface  
2008 Tapan Parikh Designing an Architecture for Delivering Mobile Information Services to the Rural Developing World  
2007 Lin Liao Location-Based Activity Recognition  
2007 Atri Rudra List Decoding and Property Testing of Error Correcting Codes  
2006 Aseem Agarwala Authoring Effective Depictions of Reality by Combining Multiple Samples of the Plenoptic Function Honorable Mention, 2007 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
2006 Mike Swift Improving the Reliability of Commodity Operating Systems  
2005 Gerome Miklau Confidentiality and Integrity in Distributed Data Exchange  
2005 Zasha Weinberg Accurate Annotation of Non-Coding RNAs in Practical Time  
2004 Luke McDowell Meaning for the Mases: Theory and Applications for Semantic Web and Semantic Email Systems  
2004 Matthew Richardson Learning and Inference in Collective Knowledge Bases  
2003 AnHai Doan Learning to Map between Structured Representations of Data Winner, 2004 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
2003 Jonathan Aldrich Using Types to Enforce Architectural Structure  
2002 Mathieu Blanchette Algorithms for Phylogenetic Footprinting  
2002 Stefan Savage Protocol Design in an Uncooperative Internet  
2001 Jeremy Buhler Search Algorithms for Biosequences Using Random Projection  
2000 Michael Ernst Dynamically Detecting Likely Program Invariants Honorable Mention, 2001 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award
Last changed Tue, 2013-01-22 11:16