Matei Zaharia has won the 2014 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his thesis “ An Architecture for Fast and General Data Processing on Large Clusters“.   The thesis presents and analyzes the core ideas behind the Spark system (now known as Apache Spark), which is taking over the Big Data analytics world.

Fellow AMPLab alum John Duchi won Honorable Mention for his thesis ” Multiple Optimality Guarantees in Statistical Learning“, which takes a novel, holistic view of multiple tradeoffs in Machine Learning algorithms.

These awards are strong indicators of the groundbreaking work being done by all our students here at Berkeley and are particularly well-deserved honors for Matei and John, who are now faculty members at MIT and Stanford respectively.  Congratulations!

The ACM Press release is at:

http://www.acm.org/press-room/news-releases/2015/dissertation-award-14

It’s going to be a Berkeley-oriented evening at the ACM Awards in June – good thing that they are holding the event in San Francisco.