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.
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
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
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-BassettSystems for Improving Internet Availability and Performance.
2011
Seth Cooper, A Framework for Scientic 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 OperatingSystems.
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.