The SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award was established in 2013. The award recognizes outstanding doctoral dissertations that significantly advance the state of the art in the science of embedded systems, in the spirit and legacy of Dr. Paul Caspi’s work.

The SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award is presented at most once per year, to the author of an outstanding dissertation in the area of Embedded Systems. The author of the winning dissertation is invited to publish a dissertation summary in the ACM SIGBED Newsletter. The award includes an award certificate for the author and an honorarium of 2000 USD sponsored by ACM SIGBED. A public citation for the award paper is placed on the SIGBED website.

• 2021: Arpan Gujarati, Technische Universität Kaiserslautern, Germany, for his thesis Towards “Ultra-Reliable” CPS: Reliability Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Systems
• 2020: Daniel J. Fremont, UC Berkeley, USA, for his thesis Algorithmic Improvisation
• 2017: Guillaume Baudart, École normale supérieure, Paris, for his thesis A Synchronous Approach to Quasi-Periodic Systems
• 2016: Santiago Pagani, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, for his thesis Power, Energy, and Thermal Management for Clustered Manycores
• 2015: Marco Zimmerling, ETH Zurich, for his thesis End-to-end Predictability and Efficiency in Low-power Wireless Networks
• 2014: Arjun Radhakrishna, IST Austria, for his thesis Quantitative Specifications for Verification and Synthesis
• 2013: Bernard Blackham, University of New South Wales, NICTA, for his thesis Towards Verified Microkernels for Real-Time Mixed-Criticality Systems

The SIGBED Paul Caspi Memorial Dissertation Award is given for an outstanding doctoral dissertation dated within about one year preceding the nomination due date. For the 2021-2022 award, the dissertation should be dated during the period of 1 January 2021 to 28 February 2022. Exceptional cases are handled by the award committee chair. The topic should fall in embedded, real-time, or cyber-physical systems.

An award committee is formed by its chair, who shall adjudicate conflicts of interest, and appoint substitutes to the committee as necessary. Dissertations supervised by an award committee member are ineligible to be nominated. Committee members may continuously remain on the committee for not more than three years. The award committee shall be no fewer than five persons in size.

Selection Committee for the 2021-2022 Award:

• Wanli Chang (Chair)
• Alessandro Pinto, Raytheon Technologies, USA
• Claire Pagetti, ONERA, France
• Chuchu Fan, MIT, USA
• Preeti Ranjan Panda, IIT Delhi, India
• Yuan-Hao Chang, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
• Zhishan Guo, University of Central Florida, USA

Nominations are solicited annually via major mailing lists. Additionally, dissertation advisers may also be contacted for solicitation of award nominations.

A nomination should consist of an email to the award committee chair (Wanli Chang: wanli dot chang dot rts at gmail dot com) copied to the SIGBED chair (Steve Liu: xueliu at cs dot mcgill dot ca) with subject line “Paul Caspi Award Nomination” and the following items in the body of the e-mail:

• Name, address, phone number, and email address of the supervisor of the dissertation being nominated (the nominator).

• Name, address, phone number, and email address of the candidate for whom an award is recommended (the nominee).

• Name, address, phone number, and email address of anyone else who is providing a statement in support of the nomination.

The following additional documents should be attached to that email:

• A short statement (up to 500 words) explaining why the nominee deserves the award, from both theoretical breakthrough and practical impact.

• Supporting statements (up to 400 words) from up to two persons in addition to the nominator.

• The nominated dissertation in an English language version.

• A list of the nominee’s publications that correspond to chapters in the nominated dissertation.

• The CV of the nominee.

The primary selection criterion is the quality of the candidate’s work, with the aim to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations. The award committee may choose to issue no award in a given year.

Nominations for 2021-2022 dissertations are due on 28 February 2022. In order to ensure full consideration by the committee, please send your nomination to the committee chair by the deadline.