Ph.D. student Siva Kesava Reddy Kakarla won a Best Student Paper Award at ACM SIGCOMM 2020, which is the flagship conference for computer networking research. The award was given for Siva’s paper “GRoot: Proactive Verification of DNS Configurations,” which is joint with Drs. Ryan Beckett and Behnaz Arzani of Microsoft Research as well as Siva’s UCLA advisors, Professors Todd Millstein and George Varghese. Two out of the 53 papers accepted to the conference were given such an award. The Domain Name System (DNS) is a globally distributed system that the world relies upon to translate human-readable Internet URLs, such as www.ucla.edu, into the IP addresses that are required by the underlying infrastructure, such as 164.67.228.152. Small errors in the way that DNS is configured can have large consequences, and DNS misconfigurations have rendered popular services like GitHub, HBO, LinkedIn, and Microsoft Azure inaccessible for extended periods. Siva and his collaborators developed the first technology that is capable of verifying the correctness of DNS configuration files, over all possible domain-name lookups. Siva implemented their approach in a tool called GRoot, and he used GRoot to identify previously unknown errors in multiple organizations’ DNS configurations. This was a banner year for UCLA Computer Science at SIGCOMM. The department had four research papers accepted to the conference, and Professor Lixia Zhang won the ACM SIGCOMM Award for Lifetime Contribution and gave a keynote talk at the conference.