Konstantinos Kallas, a new Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department, has been honored with the prestigious ACM SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award for his groundbreaking work in improving software systems.
ACM gave him this award at the 2024 Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP) in Austin, Texas, for his dissertation, Just-in-Time Scale-out of Shell Programs, Correctly. This award is the highest accolade SIGOPS bestows upon a PhD student in the field of operating systems research. Kallas’s dissertation led to the development of the PaSh project, an innovative open-source software ecosystem that improves the performance and accuracy of shell scripts. Supported by the Linux Foundation, PaSh is set to make a lasting impact on the shell scripting community (https://github.com/binpash).
Established by ACM SIGOPS in 2013, the Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award celebrates innovative research in software systems, embodying the creative spirit of Dennis Ritchie. It serves as both an honor and a reminder of Ritchie’s legacy, emphasizing the transformative impact a single researcher can achieve in software systems research.
An anonymous reviewer highlighted Kallas’s contribution by stating: “[He uses] sophisticated programming language-inspired ideas to bring unprecedented clarity and efficiency to the chaotic world of shell scripts—a domain widely used (but not loved) in the real world and historically underserved by academic research.”
For more details on this award, visit the SIGOPS Awards page.