Awardees
31st May 2018 : the ICTEAM Thesis Award 2018 was granted to Adrien Taylor for his thesis entitled Convex Interpolation and Performance Estimation of First-order Methods for Convex Optimization (supervisors: François Glineur and Julien Hendrickx).
The jury also decided to grant a "special" ICTEAM Thesis Award for outstanding technological impact to David Lebrun for his thesis entitled Reaping the Benefits of IPv6 Segment Routing.
Both recipients received 2,000 € and a diploma.
Speech delivered by Luc Vandendorpe, Chair of the selection committee
I am in front of you on behalf of the jury for the Best PhD Award committee, that I had the honor to chair this year for the third time.
The jury had the following members: Pierre-Antoine Absil, David Bol, Christophe De Vleeschouwer, Etienne Rivière, and myself.
This year we received 8 applications, all of excellent quality. Therefore, I first would like to congratulate all the candidates for their work and their achievements.
The jury has analysed all applications on the basis of
- A motivation letter written by the applicant
- A CV including publications and reports produced by the candidate
- The report of the PhD committee
- Supporting letters obtained by the candidate
- The PhD dissertation itself.
The important criteria taken into account are
- The nature and originality of the research questions and the methodology chosen by the candidate
- The quality of the results and the assessment provided the supporting letters and the jury
- The independence in conducting research
- The publications and the possible impact already achieved by the candidate
- The dissertation itself.
On this basis, the jury unanimously, has decided to award the 2018 Best Award to Adrien Taylor, for the PhD entitled “Convex Interpolation and Performance Estimation of First-order Methods for Convex Optimization”. The supervisors are François Glineur and Julien Hendrickx. Congratulations to Adrien and his advisors. As Adrien could not be with us today, Julien Hendrickx has kindly accepted to share a bit of the content with us.
The story does not stop here!
The jury has as duty to select a candidate who should be awarded, and the selection has to be operated on the basis on different criteria. What is certainly clear, is that there is not a unique way of obtaining a good or outstanding PhD dissertation. In a similar manner, there is not a single way of performing good or excellent research.
In this respect, the jury has had its attention attracted by the work submitted by another candidate. This PhD has had an outstanding impact on the technology side. The PhD work translated both into contributions accepted to standardization committees (it turns out to be IETF in this case) and code pieces accepted as contributions to the Linux kernel. In view of the challenges that these achievements constitute, because of this outstanding impact, the jury also unanimously decided to deliver an award to the PhD entitled “Reaping the Benefits of IPv6 Segment Routing” authored by David Lebrun. David Lebrun had Olivier Bonaventure as PhD advisor.
This can be seen as the Best PhD Award for the technological impact.
Congratulations to Adrien and David !
More about the ICTEAM Thesis Award
This award, which consists of an amount of 2000 €, is granted yearly to the best doctoral thesis that was publicly defended in the course of the previous civil year and for which at least one of the co-directors is officially a member of ICTEAM.
Read the regulations to know more.