The Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award was created in 2013 by ACM SIGOPS to recognize research in software systems and to encourage the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research.
The award committee consisted of Ed Bugnion, Robbert van Renesse, and Hank Levy.
For his dissertation
Unobservable communications over untrusted infrastructure
at
University of Texas, Austin
advised by
Michael Walfish
From the nomination letters
"This is an exemplary dissertation. Its outstanding technical content is matched by an exceptionally clear-minded and successful effort at developing the additional depth, perspective, and clarity that make dissertations irreplaceable statements of scholarship, instead of binders for conference papers."
“[this dissertation] is much more than the “sum of its parts” – it is a significant advance over the underlying papers published about this work, laying out all the pieces in a coherent and thoughtful way.”
The technical work is clever, creative, and elegant; the limitations and indebtedness to prior work are generously discussed, the narrative offers remarkably lucid explanations of the minutest technical detail at a resolution that conference papers cannot match.
The awards were announced Tuesday, October 29, 2019 at the SOSP 2019 banquet and awards session in Huntsville, Ontario, Canada