ETH Medal for doctoral theses
Michael Rabinovich and Dimitar K. Dimitrov, two doctoral students from the Department of Computer Science, have won the ETH Medal for their outstanding doctoral theses.
Outstanding Master’s and doctoral theses are honoured with the Silver Medal of ETH Zurich and a financial sum. The prize will be awarded at the doctoral awards ceremony.
Michael Rabinovich | ETH Medal
Thesis: Modeling Developable Surfaces with Discrete Orthogonal Geodesic Nets
Supervisor: Prof. Olga Sorkine Hornung, Interactive Geometry Lab
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Michael’s thesis takes a closer look at the long-standing problem of digital modeling of inextensible thin sheets, for instance, paper or sheet metal. In the course of his research, he invented a discrete model for “digital paper”, proved various mathematical properties about it and showed practical 3D modeling results. This work is relevant for computer-aided design and fabrication of free form surfaces, such as can commonly be found in modern architecture.
Dimitar K. Dimitrov | ETH Medal
Thesis: Concurrency Analysis for Abstract Data Types
Supervisor: Prof. Martin Vechev, Secure, Reliable, and Intelligent Systems Lab (SRI)
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Dimitar's thesis solves a number of fundamental problems in practical verification of concurrent and distributed systems. One of his major contributions is in lifting the decades-old notion of low-level conflict between concurrent operations to rich logical declarative notions, enabling the analysis of modern systems with much greater precision and scale than previously possible. Further, he solves an open problem in the analysis of parallel programs (of more than 25 years), generalizing prior verification methods to much richer and practical classes of happens-before relations, while maintaining the same asymptotic complexity.