News & awards

The Council of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected Kristin Lauter to the rank of AAAS Fellow. The Council elects members whose “efforts on behalf of the advancement of science, or its applications, are scientifically distinguished.” The Council elects Fellows deliberately and carefully to preserve the honor attached to its recognition. Kristin is honored for the distinguished contributions to computational number theory, particularly for path-breaking work on homomorphic encryption, and for effective leadership in advancing careers of women in mathematics.

Anuj Kalia received “Honorable Mention” for the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award for his Doctoral research thesis, Efficient Remote Procedure Calls for Datacenters. The award recognizes research in software systems and encourages the creativity that Dennis Ritchie embodied, providing a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy and what a difference one person can make in the field of software systems research. This is an annual award presented in alternating years at SOSP and OSDI.

On day two of HTN Now November, we welcomed the Microsoft Research InnerEye team to share how their AI for medical image analysis programme is benefiting clinicians at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS FT.

Javier Alvarez-Valle, Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research and Dr Raj Jena, Group Leader in Machine Learning & Radiomics in Radiation therapy, University of Cambridge, led the session.

The InnerEye team partnered with Addenbrooke’s Hospital to support areas such as consistent radiotherapy contouring and planning for prostate and head and neck cancer treatment.

The team hope to democratise AI for medical image analysis by empowering researchers, healthcare providers, and life-science organisations to build their own medical imaging AI models using Microsoft Azure.

The InnerEye Deep Learning Toolkit is now open-source software on GitHub.

Landon Cox received the SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for his paper TaintDroid: An Information-Flow Tracking System for Realtime Privacy Monitoring on Smartphones.

This paper, co-authored with his students and colleagues, was published in the 9^th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) in October 2010 and has had close to 4000 citations so far.

TaintDroid was the first paper to demonstrate how mobile apps share our sensitive information in unexpected and often underhanded ways. The work was executed with elegance and is impressive in its attention to detail and in the depth of its results. TaintDroid is an excellent demonstration of good design and tasteful choice of tradeoffs.

This highly influential piece of work led other researchers to follow its lead by uncovering all sorts of additional problems with modern smartphone operating systems. It got the industry to take notice and react by plugging privacy holes in their products.  Landon’s work caught the attention of mainstream media with articles such as Ars Technica,  September 30, 2010

Andrew Baumann was awarded the 2020 SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award for his paper published with his colleagues, The Multikernel: A new OS architecture for scalable multicore systems, published in the SOSP ’09: Proceedings of the ACM SIGOPS 22nd symposium on Operating systems principles. It synthesized a number of ideas from microkernels to build a highly scalable multiprocessor operating system. Barrelfish motivated the need for designing a single machine operating system as a distributed system, with shared memory message queues for communication between applications, per-core kernels, and scalable, user-level services.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) India Council has named Dr. Ranjita Bhagwan as the recipient of the 2020 ACM India Outstanding Contributions in Computing by a Woman (OCCW) Award. A selection committee comprising eminent international personalities chose Ranjita for this inaugural edition of the award.

Sriram Rajamani, MSR India Lab Director, received the “Eminent Scientist” award from the Alumni Association of College of Engineering, Guindy (AACEG). Each year they select a number of alumni for the Distinguished Alumnus Award.  This year’s distinguished alumni have excelled in academics, industry, military, sports, philanthropy, and general accomplishments. The accomplishments of these awardees exemplify the excellence of CEG. Read more.

Nachi Nagappan and Tom Zimmermann’s paper from International Conference on Software Testing (ICST) 2010, “Searching for a Needle in a Haystack: Predicting Security Vulnerabilities for Windows Vista”, was awarded the Most Influential Paper (MIP) award. ICST acknowledges two types of MIP: MIP Scientific and MIP Practical. Their paper was chosen for the MIP Practical.

HTN would like to say a huge congratulations and thank you to everyone involved.