Danai’s dissertation won both the nomination for the  ACM Doctoral Dissertation award, as well as one of the three Honorable mentions for the SCS Doctoral Dissertation award. CMU/SCS is allowed to nominate two dissertations for the ACM award. The full announcement by the Dean  is below:

We are pleased to give you the 2015 selections for the SCS/ECE Nominations to ACM for the Doctoral Dissertation Award and the winner of the SCS Doctoral Dissertation award for 2015:

• ACM Nomination & SCS Award: Julian Shun, advised by Guy Blelloch, CSD – Thesis title: Shared-Memory Parallelism Can Be Simple, Fast, and Scalable Abstract, .pdf
• ACM Nomination: Danai Koutra, advised by Christos Faloutsos, CSD – Thesis title: Exploring and Making Sense of Large Graphs Abstract, .pdf

The committee also chose 3 Honorable Mentions for the SCS Dissertation Award this year:

1. Danai Koutra (see above)
2. Anca Dragan, advised by Siddhartha Srinivasa, RI – Thesis Title: Legible Robot Motion Planning Abstract, .pdf
3. David Bamman, advised by Noah Smith, LTI – Thesis Title: People-Centric Natural Language Processing Abstract, .pdf

The committee consisted of: Michael Erdmann, Chair; Nancy Pollard; and Ziv-Bar Joseph.

Congratulations, Danai!