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.

• 2022: Tanya Amert, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA, “Enabling Real-Time Certification of Autonomous Driving Applications”
• 2021: Arpan Gujarati, TU Kaiserslautern, Germany, “Towards ‘Ultra-Reliable’ CPS: Reliability Analysis of Distributed Real-Time Systems”
• 2020: Daniel J. Fremont, UC Berkeley, USA, “Algorithmic Improvisation”
• 2017: Guillaume Baudart, Ecole Normale Superieure Paris, France, “A Synchronous Approach to Quasi-Periodic Systems”
• 2016: Santiago Pagani, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, “Power, Energy, and Thermal Management for Clustered Manycores”
• 2015: Marco Zimmerling, ETH Zurich, Switzerland, “End-to-End Predictability and Efficiency in Low-power Wireless Networks”
• 2014: Arjun Radhakrishna, IST Austria, “Quantitative Specifications for Verification and Synthesis”
• 2013: Bernard Blackham, University of New South Wales, Australia, “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 2022-2023 award, the dissertation should be dated during the period of 1 March 2022 to 31 March 2023. 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. Members may continuously remain on the committee for not more than two years. The award committee shall be no fewer than five persons in size.

Award Committee for 2022-2023

• Wanli Chang (Chair)
• Pi-Cheng Hsiu, Academia Sinica
• Tullio Vardanega, University of Padua
• Jinkyu Lee, SKKU
• Xenofon Koutsoukos, Vanderbilt University
• Antonio Barbalace, University of Edinburgh
• Susmit Jha, SRI International

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) 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 perspectives of 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 2022-2023 dissertations are due on 31 March 2023.