An incoming School of Computer Science faculty member and a former Ph.D. student recently received honors for their dissertations.

Dimitrios Skarlatos, who will join the Computer Science Department (CSD) faculty this fall, received the joint 2021 ACM SIGARCH & IEEE CS TCCA Outstanding Dissertation Award for his contributions to redesigning the abstractions and interfaces that connect hardware and operating systems. His thesis, "Rethinking Computer Architecture and Operating Systems Abstractions for Good and Evil," focuses on uncovering security vulnerabilities and building defenses at the boundary between hardware and operating systems, and redesigning abstractions and interfaces between the two layers to improve performance and scalability.

The award was presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) this past June. Skarlatos earned his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2020 and spent the past year at Facebook Research.

Goran Žužić, who earned his Ph.D. in computer science from CSD in 2020 and is now a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich, was one of two researchers to receive the 2021 Principles of Distributed Computing Doctoral Dissertation Award for his research on a fundamental problem in distributed graph algorithms.

Žužić’s thesis, “Towards Universal Optimality in Distributed Optimization” shows that it is possible to design distributed algorithms that are optimal for every graph topology. His advisor was Bernhard Haeupler, an associate professor in CSD. The award will be presented later this month during the ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing.