The iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award is a prestigious annual competition introduced in 2013 that recognizes outstanding work in the information field. Nominations are solicited from all members of the iSchools organization and judged by a committee drawn from leading international schools.
The iSchools Organization is proud to announce the winner of the 2024 Doctoral Dissertation Award: Wuyang Chen (The University of Texas at Austin, United States of America) nominated by Prof. Zhangyang Wang for the Dissertation "Demystifying Deep Network Architectures: from Theory to Applications" won the Award in this year's very close competition. Runner up is Jinkyung Katie Park (Rutgers University, United States of America) nominated by Prof. Vivek Singh for the dissertation "Design Intervention to Reduce Online Incivility".
Dr. Wuyang Chen is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Computing Science at Simon Fraser University. He was a postdoc at the University of California, Berkeley, and obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 2023. Dr. Chen’s research focuses on the theoretical understanding of deep networks and applications in foundation models, AutoML, computer vision, and scientific machine learning. His work on training-free neural architecture search was highlighted as a “Featured Advance in Artificial Intelligence” in the National Science Foundation newsletter.
Jinkyung Katie Park is a Postdoctoral Scholar at Vanderbilt University. She will join the School of Computing at Clemson University as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in Fall 2024. She received her Ph.D. degree in Information Science from Rutgers University in 2022. Her research focuses on Human-Computer interaction (HCI) to promote the online safety of vulnerable populations. By applying two broad approaches, human-centered design and human-centered AI, she explores the digital lives of individuals and designs sociotechnical systems that promote the digital well-being of users, while respecting their human values and needs.
The winner of the 2024 Doctoral Dissertation Award receives a cash prize of USD 2,500; the runner up receives USD 1,000.
The iSchools Organization would like to thank the Doctoral Dissertation Award Committee Members Kimiz Dalkir (McGill University), Jia Tina Du (Charles Sturt University), Emi Ishita (Kyushu University), Michelle Kazmer (Florida State University), Håkon Larsen (OsloMet) and António Lucas Soares (University of Porto) for their outstanding work and support for the iSchools community. A special thanks goes to the external experts Jingrui He (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jaap Kamps (University of Amsterdam) and Taro Tezuk (University of Tsukuba) for their expert reviews.
The Doctoral Dissertation Award is given annually. The submission phase for 2025 will be announced soon. More information about current and past Award winners can be found at the iSchools Doctoral Dissertation Award website.
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