ISSN (print) 2049-3886/ ISSN (online) 2049-3894

The Conference of Professors and Heads of Computing (CPHC), in conjunction with BCS and the BCS Academy of Computing, annually selects for publication the best British PhD/DPhil dissertations in computer science and publishes the winning dissertation and runner up submission on the BCS website.

Whenever possible, the prize winner receives his/her award at the prestigious BCS Roger Needham Lecture, which takes place annually at the Royal Society in the autumn.

After a rigorous review process involving international experts, the judging panel selects a small number of dissertations that are regarded as exemplary, and one overall winner from the submissions.

Over forty theses have been selected for publication since the scheme began in 1990.

The latest submission date for 2012 submissions is 2 April 2012.

 
2011 winner

For 2011, the panel chose the following winning dissertation:

Communication Locality in Computation: Software, Chip Multiprocessors and Brains
Daniel Greenfield, University of Cambridge

Daniel Greenfield completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, supervised by Dr Simon Moore. Prior to this he spent many years designing innovative GPUs, media processors and network processors in Silicon Valley. He obtained his previous degrees from the University of New South Wales, where his Masters developed new algorithms in systems biology. He has won multiple competitions in software, and has represented Australia internationally. He is currently Managing Director and co-founder of Fonleap Ltd, a high-tech startup in Cambridge.

Abstract:
This thesis argues that it is the communication costs of algorithms, rather than their computation costs, that will dominate future computing concerns. That, as we move to thousands of cores on a chip, the physical spatial locality of computation and data becomes critical to performance and cost. However, there is very little in the way of theory, models, or even characterisation of such locality for Chip-Multiprocessors (CMP). This thesis adapts and extends the existing theory and models of wire locality in VLSI circuits to the physical and temporal locality of software running on CMPs. It aims to provide a new foundation for characterising, modelling, predicting and exploiting the communication properties of software, which as we show, exhibits Rentian fractal scaling. In doing so, it lays a new communication-centric foundation for CMP software and hardware, and provides fundamental insights into their continued technological scaling.

Daniel Greenfield's dissertation (PDF)

 
2011 runner up

The runner up for 2011 is:

A broad-coverage model of prediction in human sentence processing
Vera Demberg-Winterfors, University of Edinburgh

Vera Demberg-Winterfors currently heads the junior research group ‘Cognitive Models of Human Language Processing and their Application to Dialogue Systems’ at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany.

She studied Computational Linguistics at Stuttgart University, Germany. During her year abroad in 2004-2005, Vera completed an MSc in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh. She liked Edinburgh so much she decided to come back there for a doctorate. Vera received her PhD in Informatics in 2010, supervised by Dr Frank Keller and Prof. Fernanda Ferreira.

Vera Demberg-Winterfors dissertation (PDF)

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