SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award

We invite you to nominate PhD dissertations for the ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award. This award recognizes excellent thesis research by doctoral candidates in the field of mobile, sensor and ubiquitous systems and networking. The winner and up to two runners-up will be recognized at an ACM SIGMOBILE conferences of the winner's choice. The award winner will receive a plaque, a $1,000 honorarium and a complimentary registration to one of the following year ACM SIGMOBILE Conferences. The runners-up will each receive a plaque.

Current Submission Deadline: April 8, 2024 (AOE).

Current Awardees

Sujay Narayana
TU Delft
Space Internet of Things (Space-IoT)

For contributions in efficient and miniaturized Space-IoT systems.

Justin Chan (Runner Up) University of Washington
Intelligent Earable Systems for Equitable Healthcare

For advancing applicability of earable computing to scalable healthcare.

Past Awardees

2023

Jingxian Wang
Carnegie Mellon University
Blind Wireless Beamforming to Power, Heat, and Move

For advancing the science and interdisciplinary applications of wireless energy Transfer.

Andrea Ferlini (Runner Up) University of Cambridge
Exploring the Potential of Earables for Personal-Scale Sensing

For advancing the state of art of sensing in ear-worn devices.

2022

Vikram Iyer
University of Washington
Creating the Internet of Biological and Bioinspired Things

For creative and inspiring work that shows how low-power sensing, computing and communication technologies can be used to emulate naturally-ocurring biological capabilities.

Mingmin Zhao (Runner Up) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wireless Sensing with Machine Learning: Through-Wall Vision & Contactless Health Monitoring

For technical excellence in closing the gaps between RF imaging and computer vision at fine granularity in indoor, multipath-rich environments.

2021

Rajalakshmi Nandakumar
University of Washington
Computational Wireless Sensing at Scale

For creating an easily-deployed technique for low-cost millimeter-accuracy sensing on commodity hardware, and its bold and high-impact applications to important societal problems.

Tingjun Chen (Runner Up) Columbia University
Algorithms and Experimentation for Future Wireless Networks: From Internet-of-Things to Full-Duplex

For contributions to ultra-low-power wireless networks based on energy harvesting, and to the theory and practice of full-duplex wireless networks.

2020

Wenguang Mao
UT Austin
Acoustic Sensing on Smart Devices

Yasaman Ghasempour (Runner Up) Rice University
Next-Generation Wireless Systems for Joint Communication and Sensing in Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz Spectrum

Elahe Soltanaghaei (Runner Up) University of Virginia
Sensing the Physical World Using Pervasive Wireless Infrastructure

2019

Fadel Adib
MIT
Wireless Systems that Extend Our Senses

Fadel's dissertation proposes ways in which Wi-Fi signals, traditionally used for communication, can be extended for use as sensing tools that enable us to learn about our environment without physically reaching out to the various objects in it.

2018

Vamsi Talla
University of Washington
Power, Communication, Sensing Solutions for Energy Constrainted Platforms

Vamsi's dissertation proposes wireless power delivery and ultra-low power backscatter based communication and sensing solutions for the next billion devices.

Pengyu Zhang
UMass
Leveraging Backscatter for Ultra-Low Power Wireless Sensing Systems

Pengyu's thesis presents fundamental principles underlying the physical layer, hardware architecture, and operating system design of backscatter based sensors to enable widespread deployment of such systems.

Swarun Kumar (Runner Up)
MIT
Pushing the Limits of Wireless Networks

Swarun's thesis significantly improves the performance of wireless networks in presence of interference and mobility, and enhances them with accurate location.

Eligibility

  1. Nominations are limited to one doctoral dissertation per department, and may be from any PhD-granting university in the world.
  2. The thesis should have been successfully defended and the final version of the dissertation must have been accepted at the nominee's host institution between 1st April 2023 and 31st March 2024.
  3. The submission must be on a topic related to mobile, sensor and ubiquitous systems and networking. The determination of whether a submission is in scope for the award will be made by the SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee.
  4. An English-language version of the dissertation must be submitted with the nomination.
  5. A dissertation can be nominated for both the SIGMOBILE Doctoral Dissertation Award and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award.
  6. Self-nominations are not accepted.

Submission Deadline

April 8, 2024 (AoE)

Submission Email:

cecilia.mascolo (AT) cl.cam.ac.uk

Submission Procedure

All nomination materials must be in English, in PDF format, and submitted by email to the Committee Chair by the submission deadline. Late submissions will not be considered. Nominations must include:

  1. A statement from the thesis advisor summarizing the contributions and potential impact of the work (no more than two pages).
  2. A link to the dissertation itself (please refrain from sending large attachments by email) which can be downloaded without difficulty.
  3. An endorsement letter by the department chair, confirming that the thesis was successfully defended and the final document accepted within the qualifying time period (dates mentioned above).

Dissertation Award Committee

  • Fadel Adib, MIT, USA
  • Cecilia Mascolo (Chair), University of Cambridge, UK
  • Junehwa Song, KAIST, Korea
  • Lin Zhong, Yale University, USA
  • Xia Zhou, Columbia University, USA

Past Committee Members

  • Aruna Balasubramanian (Stony Brook University)
  • Cecilia Mascolo (University of Cambridge)
  • Mahadev Satyanarayanan (chair) (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Lin Zhong (Yale University)
  • Xia Zhou (Columbia University)

Doctoral Dissertation Award Funding

The funding comes exclusively from ACM SIGMOBILE.

Doctoral Dissertation Award Selection Committee

The Doctoral Dissertation Award Selection Committee will consist of several SIGMOBILE members, one of whom will be appointed as the Selection Committee chair. Award committee members will be appointed by the current SIGMOBILE awards chair. The committee chair will adjudicate conflicts of interest, appointing substitutes to the committee as necessary. Committee members may remain on the committee for up to four years.

Resolution of Conflict of Interest

A member of the Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee who has a potential conflict of interest should report it to the committee chair, and the committee chair will determine whether a conflict exists. If the conflict exists, the committee chair and the SIGMOBILE award chair will replace the member of the award selection committee with another volunteer.

A potential conflict of interest occurs when a person is involved in making a decision that: could result in that person, a close associate of that person, or that person's company or institution receiving significant financial gain, such as a contract or grant, or could result in that person, or a close associate of that person, receiving significant professional recognition, such as an award or the selection of a paper, work, exhibit, or other type of submitted presentation. Some examples of instances of associations that could cause a conflict of interest are: employment at the same institution or company candidate for employment at the same institution or company received an honorarium or stipend from the institution or company within the last year co-author on book or paper in the last 48 months co-principal investigator on grant or research project actively working on project together family relationship close personal relationship graduate advisee/advisor relationship deep personal animosity.