The winner of the 2006 Distinguished Dissertations was:

Visual Object Category Recognition
Robert Fergus
University of Oxford
Supervised by Professors Andrew Zisserman and Pietro Perona

Robert Fergus received the MEng degree in Information Engineering from the University of Cambridge, UK in 2000. In 2002 he received an MSc from Caltech, USA and in 2005 he completed his PhD at the University of Oxford, UK.

In 2003, he received the Best Paper Award from the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference.
Robert Fergus's dissertation (15.7 Mb)

Runners up

Membrane Systems for Molecular Computing and Biological Modelling
Francesco Bernardini
University of Sheffield
Supervised by Dr. Marian Gheorghe

Francesco Bernardini is a post-doctoral researcher at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, University of Leiden, The Netherlands. He obtained a PhD in Computer Science  from The University of Sheffield, UK, in 2006  and an Master Degree in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Italy, in 2002.

His research interests are in Systems Biology and Bio-inspired Computing, especially Membrane Computing, and his work has been disseminated through several publications (more than 15) including papers in high profile journals.
Francesco Bernardini's dissertation (1.0 Mb)

Exploiting Development to Enhance the Scalability of Hardware Evolution
Tim Gordon
University College London
Supervised by Peter Rounce

Timothy Gordon received the B.Sc. in Chemistry, the M.Sc. in Information Technology and the Ph.D. in Computer Science from University College London in 1994, 1995 and 2005 respectively.

His Ph.D. research focussed on the application of evolutionary algorithms and computational development to hardware design. His recent interests include the use of evolutionary algorithms in finance. He currently works for a London hedge fund. Tim Gordon's dissertation (2.2 Mb)

Biomimetic and Autonomic Server Ensemble Orchestration
Sunil Nakrani
University of Oxford
Supervised by Professors William F. McColl and Craig A. Tovey

Sunil Nakrani is an Anderson Interface Postdoctoral fellow in the Centre for Bio-Inspired Design and the School of Industrial and Systems  Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.

He received an MSc in Communication Engineering from the Imperial College, London in 1990, an MSc and a PhD in Computation from the Oxford University in 2005.

During 1990-2000, he held position as software/system engineer at the IBM Hursley Laboratory in Winchester, UK and at the IBM Networking Laboratory in Research, USA, focusing on networking and transaction processing.

He was a visiting scholar in the schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering/Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology during 2003-2005.
Sunil Nakrani's dissertation (2.5 Mb)


Local reasoning for Java
Matthew Parkinson
University of Cambridge
Supervised by Gavin Bierman and Andrew Pitts.

Matthew Parkinson completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, Computer Laboratory, UK on 'Local Reasoning in Java'. His thesis extended separation logic reason about a sequential fragment of the Java programming language.

After submitting, he worked at Middlesex University, UK, for one year with Professor Richard Bornat on verifying concurrent algorithms. He is now a RAEng/EPSRC Research Fellow in the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK.
Matthew Parkinson's dissertation (1.2 Mb)


Hybrid Abductive Inductive Learning
Oliver Ray
University of London
Supervised by Alessandra Russo and Krysia Broda

Oliver Ray received his BEng in Information Systems Engineering from Imperial College London.  After working as a Teaching Associate, he became a PhD student in the Department of Computing at Imperial College. 

His research is concerned with the integration of 'adductive' and 'inductive' logics and their application to Machine Learning.  Since completing his PhD in 2005, Dr. Ray was a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cyprus and the Japanese National Institute of Informatics. 

With his collaborators, he has worked on several extensions and applications of his doctoral work, most notably to the problems of non-monotonic induction and the prediction of HIV/AIDS drug resistance.  Dr. Ray was recently awarded a 5 year Research Fellowship at the University of Bristol where he will continue his research.
Oliver Ray's dissertation (1.1 Mb)

Design and Evaluation of Crash Tolerant Protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks
Einar W. Vollset 
University of Newcastle Upon Tyne 
Supervised by Paul Ezhilchelvan
Einar W. Vollset's dissertation (3.2 Mb)