CSE Best Dissertation Award 2021-22 Recipients Announced

We are pleased to announce the recipients of 2021-22 CSE Best PhD Dissertation Award, which recognizes outstanding PhD dissertations completed by students in our program. We received many exceptional submissions, and the selection committee had a difficult task in choosing the winners.

We are pleased to announce that the recipient of the CSE Best PhD Dissertation Award is Dr. Aoyu WU for his work on Efficient Creation and Analysis of Visualizations for Data Communication. We congratulate Aoyu on this well-deserved honor.

In addition, we would like to recognize the following students for their outstanding dissertations, which were selected as Honorable Mentions:

1. Dr. Qichen WANG, for his work on [Conjunctive Query Processing with Comparisons and Updates] advised by Prof. Ke YI
2. Dr. Peisen YAO, for his work on [Solidifying and Scaling SMT-based Program Analysis] advised by Dr. Charles ZHANG
3. Dr. Junxue ZHANG, for his work on [Towards Efficient Transports for Datacenter Networking with High Environmental Variations] advised by Prof. Kai CHEN

About Aoyu's Dissertation and His Sharing

Aoyu's research is centered on human-computer interaction and data visualization. He is particularly invested in designing and evaluating intelligent, interactive systems that facilitate the creation of data visualizations for communication, data analysis, and data-driven decision-making. His work has garnered numerous industrial and academic accolades, including the Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship, Hong Kong ICT Award, Asia-Pacific ICT Award, and ACM CHI 2022 Honorable Mention, and has been featured in media outlets such as SCMP and Tai Kung Pao.

His Ph.D. thesis addresses the growing public demand for access to and analysis of data. As data visualizations have become a primary medium for public data communication, the rapid increase in their use has led to challenges in readability and quality. Aoyu's thesis explores these issues through a comprehensive blend of research methods, including literature reviews, empirical studies, and machine learning techniques. He specifically concentrates on developing innovative recommendation systems for creating high-quality visualizations and formalizing visualizations as a new first-class object for efficient analysis. By combining these two approaches, his dissertation contributes to a novel online knowledge ecosystem that both extracts knowledge from web visualizations and aids the public in generating new visualizations to convey data.

Aoyu would like to express his gratitude to Prof. Huamin QU and the members of the HKUST Vis Lab. Prof. Qu is not only a renowned researcher in his field, but also an exceptional educator. He has established the HKUST Vis Lab, which fosters a unique culture that encourages Aoyu and promotes critical thinking through experiential learning. Aoyu also wishes to extend his appreciation to his mentors for their invaluable support.

We would like to extend our congratulations to all our award recipients, as well as our sincere thanks to all of the students who submitted their dissertations for consideration. We are proud of the excellent work being done by our students and are grateful for their contributions to our program.

We will be presenting the awards at an upcoming seminar featuring our Best Dissertation Award winner, Aoyu WU, on May 8, 2023. We encourage all of our students, faculty, and staff to attend and celebrate the accomplishments of our award recipients.

Dr. Aoyu WU, the recipient of the CSE Best Dissertation Award (2021-22)

Honorable mentions recipients - Dr. Qichen WANG (Left), Dr. Peisen YAO (Middle) and Dr. Junxue ZHANG (Right)