Winner of SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2023

Friday, January 19, 2024 00:00

Shreshth Tuli from Imperial College London: AI and Co-Simulation Driven Resource Management in Fog Computing Environments

The SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award is an annual award that aims to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group in terms of scientific originality, scientific significance, practical relevance, impact, and presentation.

The winning dissertation “AI and Co-Simulation Driven Resource Management in Fog Computing Environments” was authored by Shreshth Tuli from Imperial College London, under the supervision of Professor Nicholas R. Jennings and Dr. Giuliano Casale. The selection committee was impressed with the proposal to deliver QoS management algorithms for Fog computing by coupling deep neural networks (DNN) models at runtime with a live digital twin (co-simulator) of the Fog infrastructure that acts as a data generator to fine-tune the DNNs whenever the predictions are observed to lower in confidence. The combination of DNN and co-simulator was shown in the thesis to be capable of tackling hard scheduling and fault-tolerance problems that arise in the Fog.

The award is to be presented at the 15th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) scheduled to be held in London in May 2024.

Given the high quality of dissertations nominated for this award, the committee decided to publicly recognize another dissertation as Runner-Up, “Performance Engineering of Serverless Applications and Platforms” authored by Dr. Simon Eismann, of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, under the supervision of Prof. Samuel Kounev.

The award selection committee for 2023 was chaired by Prof. Cristina L. Abad of ESPOL University in Ecuador, and consisted of the following members:

  • Varsha Apte, IIT Bombay, India
  • Valeria Cardellini, Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”, Italy
  • David Daly, MongoDB, USA
  • Anshul Gandhi, Stony Brook University, USA
  • Klaus Lange, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), USA
  • Arif Merchant, Google, USA
  • Evgenia Smirni, William and Mary, USA
  • Marco Vieira, University of Coimbra, Portugal
  • Jan Vitek, Charles University, Czech Republic

The SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award was established in 2011 to recognize outstanding dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group. 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. Dissertations defended between October 2022 and September 2024 will be eligible to be nominated for the 2024 award (a thesis can be nominated only once).