Winner of SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award 2025
Wednesday, January 21, 2026 00:00
Mohammad Bakhshalipour from Carnegie Mellon University : "Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture"
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 “Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture” was authored by Mohammad Bakhshalipour from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Phillip B. Gibbons. The selection committee appreciated the dissertation for its strong technical depth, originality, and relevance to both academic research and industrial practice. The thesis bridges robotics and computer architecture by introducing comprehensive, open-source benchmark suites and performance studies for real-time robotic applications, and by proposing efficient application-specific hardware accelerators and domain-specific processors that demonstrate substantial performance improvements through targeted architectural design and empirical evaluation.
The award will be presented at the 17th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), to be held in May 2026.
Given the high quality of dissertations nominated for this award, the committee decided to publicly recognize another dissertation as Runner-Up. The runner-up for the 2025 award is Yintong Huo from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her dissertation, “Log-Driven Automated Software Reliability Engineering,” was supervised by Michael Lyu.
The award selection committee for 2025 consisted of the following members:
- Weiyi Shang, University of Waterloo (Selection Committee Chair);
- Klaus-Dieter Lange, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), USA;
- Alexander Podelko, Amazon, USA;
- Jianmei Guo, East China Normal University, China;
- Pooyan Jamshidi, University of South Carolina, USA;
- Heng Li, Polytechnique Montréal, Canada;
- Philipp Leitner, Chalmers University of Technology / University of Gothenburg, Sweden;
- Jeromy Carrie, Datadog, USA;
- Junwen Yang, Meta, USA;
- Vittoria De Nitto Personè, University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy;
- Cor-Paul Bezemer, University of Alberta, Canada.
The SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award was established in 2011 to recognize outstanding doctoral dissertations within the scope of the SPEC Research Group. Contributions of interest include the design of metrics for system evaluation and the development of methodologies, techniques, and tools for measurement, benchmarking, profiling, workload characterization, dependability, and efficiency evaluation of computing systems.