Xia Zhou received the 2008-2009 Outstanding Publication Award for her paper,
“TRUST: A General Framework for Truthful Double Spectrum Auctions,”
published in INFOCOM’09. Xia proposed the first system to address
multi-party spectrum trading using truthful auction designs. TRUST builds a
spectrum marketplace that selectively buys idle spectrum pieces from
providers and sells them to a large number of buyers matching their
individual demands. The design of TRUST focuses on achieving spectrum reuse
to improve its utilization and guaranteeing truthfulness to discourage
market manipulation and encourage player participation. While conventional
truthful solutions fail when enabling spectrum reuse, TRUST makes an
important contribution of achieving both properties simultaneously. Xia is
a second-year PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Heather Zheng. She
has published papers in INFOCOM’09, MobiCom’08 and SDR’08.

Outstanding Dissertation went to Sorabh Gandhi for his thesis “Sensors,
Streams, and Spectrum: Geometry in Wireless Networks,” supervised by Prof.
Subhash Suri. His work answers some fundamental algorithmic problems in
the areas of sensor and ad hoc networks. For instance, what spatial
sampling strategy is the best for low-cost event detection in geographical
sensor networks? How to build real-time data summaries, with provable error
bounds, for streaming time series data? How to design truth-revealing
auction mechanisms for spectrum auctions? etc. Despite their apparent
diversity, these basic questions share a common thread of abstract geometric
reasoning and data structures. Two of the papers in Sorabh’s thesis received
Best Paper awards at prestigious Computer Science conferences. He also
received the 2007-2008 Outstanding Publication Award.

Pictured above (from left to right) are Xia and Sorabh.