IPA Dissertation Award

The Institute for Programming research and Algorithmics has established an annual Best IPA Dissertation Award, which is granted to the IPA PhD candidate who wrote the best IPA thesis, published in the IPA dissertation series in the preceding calendar year. The award consists of a certificate proclaiming the recipient has won the Best IPA Dissertation Award and a monetary reward. The purpose of the award is to draw attention to excellent work, to support the career of the academic in question, and to promote the IPA research field as a whole.

Eligibility

Eligible for the Best IPA Dissertation Award are those who successfully defended their PhD in the period from 1 January – 31 December of the preceding year and who have their thesis published in the IPA dissertation series. Candidates for the award must be nominated by their supervisor. If you intend to submit a nomination, please send a heads-up e-mail to ipa@tue.nl as a first step, with subject “Intended nomination IPA Dissertation Award 2022”. Nominations must consist of:

  1. an electronic (PDF) version of the dissertation,
  2. a letter from the supervisor, explaining why the thesis should be considered for the award, and
  3. a supporting report from an independent researcher who has acted as examiner of the thesis at the defence.

All documents should be sent to ipa@tue.nl, with subject “Nomination IPA Dissertation Award 2022”. The deadline for nominations is Friday March 17th, 2023.

Procedure

The nominations will be evaluated by a committee of experts. Both the supervisor’s letter and the examiner’s report will play an important role in this evaluation, as do originality, impact and relevance of the work contained in each thesis.  The nominations, rankings and discussions are kept confidential within the expert committee. Decisions of this committee are final and not subject to further discussion.

We plan to announce the winner of the award by early July 2023.

If possible, the award will be handed out at a suitable occasion (e.g., an in-person IPA event) and the award winner will be given the opportunity to present their work at this occasion.

Expert Committee

  • Tanja Vos (Open Universiteit)
  • Jetty Kleijn (Leiden University)
  • Andrea Capiluppi (University of Groningen)

Previous Award Winners

  • Alexander Bentkamp received the 2021 award, for his thesis titled Superposition for Higher-Order Logic defended at the VU.
  • Thomas Neele received the 2020 award, for his thesis titled Reductions for Parity Games and Model Checking defended at TU/e.
  • Sándor Kisfaludi-Bak received the 2019 award, for his thesis titled ETH-Tight Algorithms for Geometric Network Problems defended at TU/e.
  • Moritz Beller received the 2018 award, for his thesis An Empirical Evaluation of Feedback-Driven Software Development defended at TU Delft, and Tim Ophelders also received the 2018 award, for his thesis Continuous Similarity Measures for Curves and Surfaces defended at TU/e.
  • Davy Landman received the award for the best IPA dissertation of 2017 for his thesis Reverse Engineering Source Code: Empirical Studies of Limitations and Opportunities.
  • Sung-Shik Jongmans received the award for the best IPA dissertation of 2016 for his thesis Automata-Theoretic Protocol Programming,  which addresses topics in the intersection of coordination languages, compiler technology, distributed systems, and concurrency theory.
  • Jurriaan Rot received the award for the best IPA dissertation of 2015 for his thesis Enhanced Coinduction, which studies fundamental enhancements to the coinduction proof and definition technique.
  • Bogdan Vasilescu received the award for the best IPA dissertation of 2014 for his work on issues such as gender imbalance in program development, raising awareness about the various aspects in software development.
  • Mark Timmer received the award for the best IPA dissertation of 2013 for his advancement of the state of the art in performance and reliability analysis of modern ICT systems.
  • Cynthia Kop received the award for the best IPA dissertation of 2012 for her contributions to the field of higher-order termination.