UW CSE professor Alvin Cheung was honored by his alma mater this week with the George M. Sprowls Award, which recognizes the most outstanding Ph.D. theses in computer science submitted to MIT each year.
Cheung received the award for his dissertation titled “Rethinking the Application-Database Interface,” in which he puts forward a novel approach for optimizing the performance of applications that interact with database management systems (DBMSs). Cheung showed that real-world applications are sped up by multiple orders of magnitude when both the programming system and the DBMS are considered in tandem, using a combination of declarative database optimization and modern program analysis and synthesis techniques.
See the MIT announcement here. Or, hey, test your mettle by reading Alvin’s winning dissertation here.
Congratulations, Alvin!