Winner Announced of the Distinguished Dissertation, 2019

15 Feb 2019 04:03 PM

The winner has been announced of the Distinguished Dissertation, a prestigious academic award, run jointly by BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, in collaboration with the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC).

Miltos Allamanis, University of Edinburgh, won the competition for his PhD ‘Learning Natural Coding Conventions’.

Alkmini Sgouritsa, University of Liverpool, was the highly-commended runner-up for ‘Algorithms for Game-Theoretic Environments’.

The competition aims to increase the visibility of the significant research contributions made by the UK to computer science, especially by postgraduate students.

Due to the substantial number of high-quality dissertation entries, the committee extended their examining time to ensure that they found the one dissertation that stood above the others.

Miltos Allamanis is a researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK and is part of the Deep Program Understanding project. The basis of his PhD was using machine learning to create better tools for software engineers. By learning from existing code, his aim is to create useful machine learning-based software engineering tools, interfaces and insights.

The runner-up, Alkmini Sgouritsa, is a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics. She completed her PhD in 2017 in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Liverpool. During her time at Liverpool she contributed to teaching of the MSc module “Algorithmic Game Theory”.

The Chair of CPHC / BCS Distinguished Dissertation Competition Committee, Dr Iain Phillips from Loughborough University, said: “The selection this year took a significant amount of time. This is tribute to the quality of all the submissions. The prestige of this award brings attention to the high-quality research of the winners and, hopefully, improves their career prospects.”

The winner will be presented with their award at the BCS sponsored annual Roger Needham award in June 2019.

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