Björn Brandenburg, an MPI-SWS faculty member, has been awarded the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award in the area of mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering. The award—North America's most prestigious honor for doctoral dissertations—recognizes recent doctoral recipients who have already made unusually significant and original contributions to their fields.

Brandenburg's dissertation, "Scheduling and Locking in Multiprocessor Real-Time Operating Systems," was also selected for the 2012 Linda Dykstra Distinguished Dissertation Award, which recognizes the best dissertation among all graduates in the fields of mathematics, physical sciences, and engineering at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Lorenzo Alvisi, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has been selected for a prestigious Humboldt Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. This award provides support for him to spend up to a year at the institute, where he will work with Peter Druschel and other MPI-SWS researchers on fault-tolerant computing for multi-core servers.

This is the second year that an MPI-SWS visiting professor has received a Humboldt Award. Johannes Gehrke was a 2010 Humboldt Research Award recipient.

The Humboldt Research Award is granted "in recognition of a researcher's entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future."

We are pleased to announce that two new faculty will join MPI-SWS.



Allen Clement obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin in 2011. Allen's research aims at designing and building systems that continue to work despite the myriad of things that go 'wrong' in deployed systems, including broken components, malicious adversaries, and benign race conditions. His research builds on techniques from distributed systems, security, fault tolerance, and game theory.



Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil is joining us from Cornell University, where he obtained his PhD in computer science. Cristian's research aims at developing computational frameworks that can lead to a better understanding of human social behavior, by unlocking the unprecedented potential of the large amounts of natural language data generated online. His work tackles problems related to conversational behavior, opinion mining, computational semantics and computational advertising.

MPI-SWS faculty Rupak Majumdar, along with his coauthors, has received two best paper awards: the EAPLS 2012 best paper award and the 2012 ACM TODAES best paper award.

Rupak Majumdar and Zhenyue Long, along with Georgei Calin and Roland Meyer at TuKL, have received the ETAPS 2012 best paper award for their paper "Language-Theoretic Abstraction Refinement".

Rupak Majumdar has also received (along with Jason Cong, Bin Liu, and Zhiru Zhang) the 2012 ACM TODAES Best Paper Award for his 2010 TODAES article "Behavior-Level Observability Analysis for Operation Gating in Low-Power Behavioral Synthesis".