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ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia (SIGMM) has presented an honourable mention to Dr. Varun Singh for the thesis entitled: “Protocols and Algorithms for Adaptive Multimedia Systems.” The thesis develops and presents congestion control algorithms and signaling protocols that are used in interactive multimedia communications.  The committee was impressed by the thorough theoretical and experimental depth of the thesis and considered remarkable Dr. Singh’s efforts to shepherd his work to real world adoption which has led him to author four RFCs and several standards-track documents in the IETF. This has resulted in the incorporation of his work in the production versions of the Chrome and Firefox web browsers.

This has resulted in the incorporation of his work in the production versions of the Chrome and Firefox web browsers.

Dr. Varun Singh received his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, in 2009 his Ph.D. degree from Aalto University, Finland, in 2015.  His research has led him to making important contributions to different standardization organization: 3GPP (2008 – 2010), IETF (since 2010), and W3C (since 2014). He is the co-author of the WebRTC Statistics API. Beyond this, his research work led him to found and become CEO of callstats.io, a startup which analyses and optimizes the Quality of multimedia in real-time communication (currently, WebRTC).

The 2016 SIGMM Outstanding Ph.D. Thesis Award went to Dr. Christoph Kofler. The award committee considered Dr. Kofler’s dissertation entitled “User Intent in Online Video Search” worthy of the recognition as the thesis is the first to innovatively consider a user’s intent in multimedia search yielding significantly improved results in satisfying the information need of the user.