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Ph.D. Student Recognition

Ph.D. Student Recognition

The following lists represent Allen School and national awards and recognition earned by our Ph.D. students for the impact of their dissertation research.

Allen School Recognition

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 is 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.

2024 Winners

  • Ashish Sharma, Human-AI Collaboration to Support Mental Health and Well-Being
  • Sewon Min, Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models
Past Winners

Accessible Accordion

2023
Ari Holtzman, Interpretation Errors: Extracting Functionality From Generative Models Of Language By Understanding Them Better
Nathan Klein, Finding Structure in Entropy: Improved Approximation Algorithms for TSP and other Graph Problems

 

2022
Dhruv Jain, Sound Sensing and Feedback Techniques for Deaf and Hard of Hearing People
Kuikui Liu, Spectral Independence A New Tool to Analyze Markov Chains

 

2021
Maarten Sap, Positive AI with Social Commonsense Models
Ivan Evtimov, Disrupting Machine Learning: Emerging Threats and Applications for Privacy and Dataset Ownership

 

2020
No award given.

 

2019
Aditya Vashistha, Social Computing for Social Good in Low-Resource Environments

 

2018
Marco Tuilio Correia Ribeiro, Model Agnostic Explanations for Machine Learning Models
Kanit “Ham” Wongsuphasawat, Augmenting Exploratory Data Analysis with Visualization Recommendation

 

2017
Irene Zhang, Distributed Operating Systems for Mobile/Cloud Applications
Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Audiovisual Persona Reconstruction

 

2016
No award given.

 

2015
Adrian Sampson, Hardware and Software for Approximate Computing.
Morgan Dixon, Pixel-Based Reverse Engineering of Graphical Interfaces.

 

2014
Franzi Roesner, Security & Privacy from Untrusted Applications in Modern & Emerging Client Platforms.
Sidhant Gupta, ElectriSense: Single-Point Sensing Using EMI for Electrical Energy Disaggregation in the Home.

 

2013
Hadi Esmaeilzadeh, Approximate Acceleration for a Post-Multicore Era.

 

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

 

2011
Seth Cooper, A Framework for Scientific Discovery through Video Games

Winner, 2012 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
Roxana Geambasu, Regaining Control over Cloud and Mobile Data.

 

2009
Prasad Raghavendra, Approximating NP-hard Problems–Efficient Algorithms and Their Limits.
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.
Tapan Parikh, Designing an Architecture for Delivering Mobile Information Services to the Rural Developing World.

 

2007
Lin Liao, Location-Based Activity Recognition.
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.
Mike Swift,  Improving the Reliability of Commodity Operating Systems.

 

2005
Gerome Miklau, Confidentiality and Integrity in Distributed Data Exchange.
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.
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.
Jonathan Aldrich, Using Types to Enforce Architectural Structure.

 

2002
Mathieu Blanchette, Algorithms for Phylogenetic Footprinting
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.


National Recognition

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Awards

Presented annually to the author(s) of the best doctoral dissertation(s) in computer science and engineering.  The Doctoral Dissertation Award is accompanied by a cash prize, as well as publication in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM Books Series.

2025 Winners

  • Ashish Sharma,  ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award  (Advised by Tim Althoff)
  • Sewon Min,  ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention  (Advised by Hanna Hajishirzi and Luke Zettlemoyer)
Past Winners

Accessible Accordion

2011
Seth Cooper, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

(Advised by Zoran Popovic)

 

2009
Noah Snavely, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

(Advised by Steve Seitz)

 

2006
Aseem Agarwala, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

(Advised by David Salesin)

 

2003
AnHai Doan, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

(Advised by Pedro Domingos and Alon Halevy)

 

2000
William Chan, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

(Advised by Richard Anderson and David Notkin)
Michael Ernst, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Honorable Mention

(Advised by David Notkin)

 

1988
Anne Condon, ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award

(Advised by Richard Ladner)

Area-specific Dissertation Awards

Many sub-areas of computer science have established doctoral dissertation awards to recognize and encourage superior research and writing by doctoral candidates. 

Accessible Accordion

2024
Nathan Klein(Advised by Anna Karlin and Shayan Oveis Gharan)

 

2023
Kuikui Liu, (Advised by Shayan Oveis Gharan)

2023
Dhruv “DJ” Jain, (Advised by Jon Froehlich and Leah Findlater)

2020
Ming Liu, Runner Up (Advised by Arvind Krishnamurthy)

 

2016
Vamsi Talla, (ECE student, Advised by Josh Smith)

 

2011
Mike Piatek, Runner Up (Advised by Tom Anderson and Arvind Krishnamurthy)

2024
Justin Chan, Runner Up (Advised by Shyam Gollakota)

 

2022
Vikram Iyer, (ECE student, Advised by Shyam Gollakota)

 

2021
Rajalakshmi Nandakumar, (Advised by Shyam Gollakota)

 

2018
Vamsi Talla, (ECE student, Advised by Josh Smith)

2024
Yisu Remy Wang, Runner Up (Advised by Dan Suciu)

 

2016
Paras Koutris, (Advised by Dan Suciu)

 

2010
Chris Re, (Advised by Dan Suciu)

 

2008
Nilesh Dalvi, Honorable Mention (Advised by Dan Suciu)

 

2006
Gerome Miklau, (Advised by Dan Suciu)

2018
Irene Zhang, (Advised by Hank Levy and Arvind Krishnamurthy)

 

2013
Roxana Geambasu, Honorable Mention (Advised by Hank Levy and Yoshi Kohno)

 

2015
Karl Koscher, Runner Up (Advised by Yoshi Kohno)

 

2001
Michael Ernst, (Advised by David Notkin)

 

2020
Dominik Moritz, (Advised by Jeff Heer)

 

Highlights


Allen School News

From a robotic arm that learns to pick up new objects in real time, to a model that converts 2D videos into 3D virtual reality, to a curious chatbot that adapts to users, to machine learning methods for decoding the brain, the 2025 Research Showcase and Open House had something for everyone.

GeekWire

At the Allen School’s Research Showcase and Open House, school leaders celebrated the work of faculty and student researchers — and offered a blueprint for collaboratively tackling a set of human-centered problems for even greater impact.

Allen School News

Asai (Ph.D., ‘25), research scientist at Ai2 and incoming faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, was recognized for her pioneering research that has helped establish the foundations for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and showcase its effectiveness at reducing LLM hallucinations.