The 2018 Kaivalya Dixit
Distinguished Dissertation Award Winners
The Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award, named in memory of SPEC's long-time
president Kaivalya Dixit, honors outstanding dissertations within the scope of the SPEC
Research Group.
Based on the high quality of submissions, the SPEC Research Group selection committee
decided to recognize two papers as winners of the 2018 award.
Matteo Nardelli,
The University of Rome
The first winning dissertation — QoS-aware Deployment and Adaptation of Data
Stream Processing Applications in Geo-Distributed Environments — was authored by
Matteo Nardelli of the University of Rome, under the supervision of Professor Valeria Cardellini.
Nardelli addresses the problem of QoS-aware deployment and adaptation of data stream processing (DSP)
applications in geo-distributed environments. His contributions include the formulation of the DSP
operator placement problem and the run-time problem; design of a framework, optimizer and heuristics;
and implementation into an open-source framework.
Nikolas Herbst,
Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg
The second winning dissertation is titled Methods and Benchmarks for Auto-Scaling Mechanisms
in Elastic Cloud Environments by Nikolas Herbst of the Julius-Maximilians-Universität
Würzburg, under the supervision of Professor Samuel Kounev.
Herbst proposes several methods and related tools for automatically provisioning and scaling elastic
resources for cloud systems. The thesis is also exceptional in the effort put into validation using
plausible workloads.