SCS Announces Dissertation Award Winners, ACM Nominees

Monday, December 9, 2019 - by Susie Cribbs

Carlo Angiuli, who recently earned his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department, has received the 2018-2019 SCS Dissertation Award.

The School of Computer Science has announced that Carlo Angiuli, who recently earned his Ph.D. from the Computer Science Department, has received the 2018-2019 SCS Dissertation Award. Presented annually, the award recognizes outstanding work by an SCS graduate student and includes a cash prize and distinguished lectures by the recipient.

Angiuli, now a post-doctoral fellow in CSD, earned the award for his thesis, "Computational Semantics of Cartesian Cubical Type Theory," completed under the direction of Computer Science Professor Robert Harper.

"About a decade ago, the late mathematician Vladimir Voevodsky discovered that dependent type theory, a programming language and logic, is compatible with a mathematically inspired principle that he called the univalence axiom," Angiuli said. "Unfortunately, the mathematics of univalence doesn't tell us what it means as a computer program. My thesis describes how to run univalence as a program, and, hence, how to view dependent type theory with univalence as a programming language."

Honorable mentions for the SCS Dissertation Award include:

  • Simon Shaolei Du, Machine Learning Department, "Gradient Descent for Non-Convex Problems in Modern Machine Learning," advised by Aarti Singh and Barnabas Poczos.
  • Kenneth Holstein, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, "Designing Real-time Teacher Augmentation to Combine Strengths of Human and AI Instruction," advised by Vincent Aleven.
  • Lerrel Joseph Pinto, Robotics Institute, "Data Centric Robotic Learning," advised by Abhinav Gupta.
  • Sabrina Rashid, Computational Biology Department, "Distributed Computing in Nature," advised by Ziv Bar-Joseph.

SCS can also nominate two students to compete for the Association for Computing Machinery's Doctoral Dissertation Award, which is presented annually for the best doctoral dissertation in computer science and engineering. This year's SCS nominees are Angiuli and Du.

This year's award winners and ACM nominees were selected by Michael Erdmann, professor in the Robotics Institute; Nancy Pollard, a professor in the Computer Science Department and Robotics Institute; and Seyoung Kim, assistant professor in the Computational Biology Department.

For more information, Contact:
Byron Spice | 412-268-9068 | bspice@cs.cmu.eduVirginia Alvino Young | 412-268-8356 | vay@cmu.edu