Call-for-Nominations: SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2026

The SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations in computer benchmarking, performance evaluation, and experimental system analysis in general. Nominated dissertations will be evaluated based on their scientific originality, scientific significance, practical relevance, impact, and presentation quality.

The SPEC Research Group promotes research in quantitative system evaluation and analysis both with classical performance metrics – such as response time, throughput, scalability, and efficiency, as well as other extra-functional system properties included under the term dependability – such as availability, reliability, and security. Contributions of interest span the design of metrics for system evaluation as well as the development of methodologies, techniques, and tools for measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability, and efficiency evaluation of computing systems (e.g., classical, AI-powered, or quantum systems).

The recipient of the award will receive $1000 USD and a certificate, which will be awarded at the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2027, May 24-28, Gothenburg, Sweden). The recipient will also receive a free ICPE registration and a reimbursement-based travel compensation (up to $1000 USD).

Nomination Guidelines

A nomination consists of one PDF file less than 20MB that must include the following information in this order:

  • A nomination letter with the name of the student, the title of the dissertation, the institution where the dissertation was defended, and the date of the defense. The nomination letter should outline the outstanding contributions of the dissertation and should not exceed 2 pages (letter size) using 11-point Arial font.
  • A C.V. of the nominee (up to three pages) that clearly marks all publications/technical reports that are included in the dissertation.
  • The dissertation itself, including a one-page extended abstract of the dissertation. The dissertation may be accompanied by publications describing the same research as the dissertation. However, the dissertation itself also needs to be submitted.

SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award is open to dissertations defended between October 2024 and September 2026; a thesis can be nominated only once, which means that a 2024 thesis nominated in 2025 cannot be nominated again in 2026. If there are several outstanding submissions, the committee may choose to split the award.

Nominations should be uploaded to EasyChair at URL: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=specaward2026. The submission system will open in early August, and the hard nomination deadline is September 30th, 2026 @23:59:59 AoE.

Nominations can be provided by anyone except the thesis author. Typically, it is the thesis advisor or a member of the thesis defense committee, but other people – especially experts in performance evaluation – can do so as well.

List of Topics

The SPEC Research Group promotes research in quantitative system evaluation and analysis both with classical performance metrics – such as response time, throughput, scalability and efficiency, as well as other extra-functional system properties included under the term dependability – such as availability, reliability, and security. Contributions of interest span the design of metrics for system evaluation as well as the development of methodologies, techniques and tools for measurement, load testing, profiling, workload characterization, dependability and efficiency evaluation of computing systems.

Selection committee

  • Heng Li, Polytechnique Montreal, Canada (selection committee chair)
  • Laura Carnevali, University of Florence, Italy
  • Tao Chen, University, Birmingham, UK
  • Diego Elias Costa, Concordia University, Canada
  • Phillip B. Gibbons, CMU, USA
  • Jianmei Guo, East China Normal University, China
  • Klaus-Dieter Lange, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), USA
  • Alexander Podelko, Amazon, USA
  • Weiyi Shang, University of Waterloo, Canada
  • Ana Lucia Verbanescu, University of Twente and University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • Junwen Yang, Meta, USA

Timeline

  • Nomination deadline: September 30th, 2026, 23:59:59 AoE
  • Result notification: December 15, 2026, 23:59:59 AoE
  • Award: ICPE 2027 (May 24-28, Gothenburg, Sweden)

Contact

All questions about submissions should be emailed to info at spec dot org or heng dot li at polymtl dot ca.