January 2026
Mohammad Bakhshalipour Wins 3rd Award for PhD Dissertation
To date, PDL Alum, Mohammad Bakhshalipour has received three awards for his PhD Dissertation on Bridging Real-Time Robotics and Computer Architecture. He was advised by Phillip Gibbons. The dissertation discusses the pivotal role robotics will play in shaping future societal frameworks, addressing the pronounced gap between the fields of robotics and computer architecture research. Firstly, the thesis introduces extensive benchmark suites for robotics tasks and applications, meticulously developed from scratch to address the critical need for performance-focused, comprehensive benchmarking environments in systems and hardware research, and secondly, it proposes efficient computer architectures tailored for robotics, focusing on the development of application-specific hardware accelerators and domain-specific processors.
Most recently, Mohammad's research was awarded the 2025 SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (to be awarded in May 2026). Prior to that he received the ACM SIGMICRO Dissertation Award (2025), and the Carnegie Mellon University A.G. Milnes Award (2024), an award given by the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department to "dissertations of the highest quality".
October 2025
Juncheng Yang Receives DMR Thesis Award!
Congratulations to PDL Alum Juncheng Yang (advised by Rashmi Vinayak) on receiving the SIGOPS 2025 DMR Thesis Award for his dissertation on Designing Efficient and Scalable Key-value Cache Management Systems. The award, officially the ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award, is an annual award that recognizes outstanding doctoral research in software systems. Created by the ACsM Special Interest Group on Operating Systems (SIGOPS), it was established to honor the legacy of Dennis Ritchie, a key figure in computer science, and to encourage creativity in the field. Each year, the award is given to a recent Ph.D. graduate whose dissertation demonstrates exceptional innovation and impact on software systems. Juncheng is now an assistant professor of the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
-- info from ACM SIGOPS
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