Final Call for Nominations: SIGMOD Dissertation Award 2009

Final call for Nominations: The SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award SIGMOD has established the annual SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award to recognize excellent research by doctoral candidates in the database field. This award, which was previously known as the SIGMOD Doctoral Dissertation Award, was renamed in 2008 with the unanimous approval of ACM Council in honor of Dr. Jim Gray. SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award winners and runners-up will be recognized at the SIGMOD conference, and their dissertations will be included at SIGMOD DiSC and the SIGMOD Online web site. Winners of the award will also receive a plaque and be given the opportunity to present his or her work together with the winners of the SIGMOD Innovations and Test of Time awards. They will also be invited to serve on an evaluation committee at least once in the subsequent years. Submitted dissertations must have been accepted by a university department in any country during the previous year as detailed below. Eligibility Nominations are limited to one doctoral dissertation per department. Nominated dissertations must be submitted by December 15 2009. Each submitted doctoral dissertation must be on a topic within the scope of SIGMOD's mission, i.e., large scale data management. Each nominated dissertation must also have been successfully defended by the candidate, and the final version of each nominated dissertation must have been accepted by the candidate's department on or after September 1 of the previous year (2008). An English-language version of the dissertation must be submitted with the nomination. A dissertation can be nominated for both the SIGMOD Jim Gray Doctoral Dissertation Award and the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Selection Procedure This is a two-phase process. In the first phase, nominated dissertations are reviewed for novelty, technical depth and significance of research contribution, potential impact on theory and practice, and quality of presentation. A committee performs an initial screening to generate a short list, followed by an in-depth evaluation by the award committee of the dissertations on the short list. In the second phase, more in-depth discussion of the potential award-winning dissertations will be held, and reviewers will provide justification for their ranking. Evaluation and online discussion over a two-week period will be done using the CMT system. The award committee will inform the candidates about the result of the selection by April 15 2010, to allow the three best candidates to be recognized at the SIGMOD conference the same year. The name of the award recipient will only be publicly announced after the dissertation award session. The award committee shall consist of two co-chairs and five committee members serving staggered three-year terms. A past award winner will be invited on a yearly basis to join the committee as its eighth member. The co-chairs will take turn to chair the process, and a committee member (including co-chair) who has a student as a potential candidate in a given year will be excused from the evaluation that year. Timeline (as a guideline only): December 15 2009: Submission of thesis and supporting documents to CMT system January 15 2010: Short list due March 15 2010: Reviews/justifications/ranking due March 15- April 5 2010: Online discussion April 10 2010: Citations due April 15 2010: Notification Submission Procedure All nomination materials must be in English, and must be submitted electronically to the CMT system (https://cmt.research.microsoft.com/sigmodthesis2010) by December 15 2009. Late submissions or resubmissions will not be considered. A nomination must include: 1. Title and abstract (limited to 5000 characters) of the thesis, entered directly into the submission system. 2. A nomination letter, written by the dissertation advisor of the candidate. This letter must include: - the name, email address, mail address, and phone number of the advisor, - the name, email address, and address of the candidate, and - a summary of one or two pages of the significance of the dissertation 3. An endorsement letter signed by the department head. 4. A signed statement from the nominee, giving permission for the dissertation to appear at SIGMOD DiSC and SIGMOD Online if the dissertation is selected as an award recipient. 5. One PDF copy of the doctoral dissertation. 6. Optionally, the nomination may include up to two supporting letters from other individuals, discussing the significance of the dissertation. The writers of the supporting letters can alternatively email their letters directly to the chairs of the award committee by the deadline. Items 1-5 are compulsory - any missing item constitutes ground for rejection without further consideration. Candidates may submit at most 3 zipped files: one for items 2-4, one for the thesis, and one for item 6 (if any). Award Committee Johannes Gehrke (Co-chair) Beng Chin Ooi (Co-chair) A past year award winner Alfons Kemper Hank Korth Alberto Laender Timos Sellis Kyu-Young Whang