Some recent achievements by the PhD students in CS at the GSSI

Like many others, I believe that students are amongst the best ambassadors for an academic institution, and that their achievements are a good indication of the quality of a graduate programme and of the mentoring skills of its associated faculty members. Therefore, it has given me great pleasure to witness the accolades received by some of the (former) students in the doctoral programme in computer science at the Gran Sasso Science Institute over the last few months.

Readers of this blog might recall that I wrote posts on the following two items.

• GSSI alumna Yllka Velaj, now at CWI, was a co-recipient of the 2018 Women@McKinsey Dissertation Award.
• Emilio Cruciani (GSSI, Italy) and Roberto Verdecchia (GSSI, Italy, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, NL) were two of the authors of a research paper presented at  ICSE 2018, the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE is the flagship conference in Software Engineering and is very selective its technical-research-paper track is the most prestigious one within the conference. Emilio and Roberto were first-year CS students at the time. 

However, there were several other events worth reporting on which I was too lazy to write a few lines on this blog. Here are three more examples.

• GSSI alumni Alkida Balliu and Dennis Olivetti, now postdocs at Aalto University in  Jukka Suomela's group, co-authored a paper presented at STOC 2018. The work on the paper was done while they were at the GSSI.
• Third-year GSSI student Ahmed Abdelsalam was part of the netgroup team at CNIT/uniroma2 that won the Interworking stream at the SoftFIRE Challenge, which addresses issues related to interoperability of the current platform with other infrastructures. In particular, Ahmed's work on IPv6 Segment Routing (SRv6) and his recently developed SRv6 aware version of the network intrusion and detection system Snort featured in the award-winning proposal. If you use Linux, you are probably already running Ahmed's software!
• In May 2018, Roberto Verdecchia received three awards for his research: 
• a bronze medal at the Research Student Competition of the International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, 
• Runner-Up Best Paper Award at ICT4S for the study “Empirical Evaluation of the Energy Impact of Refactoring Code Smells” and, last but by no means least, 
• the best early career researcher award at the International Conference on Software Architectures (ICSA). 

I'm sure that this is just a small sample and that CS@GSSI students have more achievements of which I am not aware. It is a humbling experience to  see how smart many young researchers are. All one can hope for is to provide a good example for them and to play a small, positive role in their development as scientists.