Winner of SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2024

Friday, January 31, 2025 00:00

Jingzhi Gong from Loughborough University (UK): "Pushing the Boundary: Specialising Deep Configuration Performance Learning"

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 “Pushing the Boundary: Specialising Deep Configuration Performance Learning” was authored by Jingzhi Gong from Loughborough University (UK) under the supervision of Dr. Tao Chen. The selection committee particularly appreciated this thesis for its innovative approach to optimizing software performance using deep learning. The research introduces robust frameworks that significantly enhance prediction accuracy even in dynamic environments by identifying critical challenges such as selecting effective encoding methods and managing sparse data. These contributions offer valuable solutions for improving software maintenance and performance optimization in complex modern systems, demonstrating a substantial advancement in the field.

The award will be presented at the 16th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), scheduled in Toronto (Canada) in May 2025.

Given the high quality of the dissertations nominated for this award, the committee decided to publicly recognize two other dissertations as Runner-Ups: “Serverless Control Planes for Orchestration of Cloud Resources” by Dr. Alexander Joseph Fuerst of Indiana University Bloomington (USA), under the supervision of Prof. Prateek Sharma, and “Robust System Software for Quantum Computing” by Dr. Tirthak Patel of Northeastern University (USA), under the supervision of Prof. Devesh Tiwari.

The award selection committee for 2024 was chaired by Prof. Alessandro V. Papadopoulos of Mälardalen University (Sweden) and University of Málaga (Spain), and consisted of the following members:

  • J. Nelson Amaral, University of Alberta, Canada
  • Klaus-Dieter Lange, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), USA
  • Andrea Marin, Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia, Italy
  • Thijs Metsch, Intel, Germany
  • Alexander Podelko, Amazon, USA
  • Petr Tuma, Charles University, Czech Republic
  • Monica Vitali, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

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 and 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 2023 and September 2025 will be eligible to be nominated for the 2025 award (a thesis can be nominated only once).