CROSS Research Fellow Gets First Place at the 2019 SIGMOD Student Research Competition

CROSS Research Fellow Akhil Dixit won First Place in the graduate category of the Student Research Competition (SRC) at the 2019 SIGMOD/PODS conference held from June 30-July 5 in Amsterdam. Akhil won the award for his presentation on the CROSS-funded project "CAvSAT: A System for Query Answering over Inconsistent Databases." Akhil’s award was the culmination of a long process that started with the submission of a research abstract in November 2018.  Akhil was then selected to attend SIGMOD 2019 and to present a poster at the conference. The poster presentations took place on July 1, and were evaluated by a panel of judges. The three top poster presenters in each category (graduate and undergraduate) were selected to give a 10-minute oral presentation on July 2.  For his win, Akhil received a gold medal, a one-year complimentary membership in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and a $500 prize. He will also now advance to the Grand Finals of the 2020 ACM Student Research Competition, in which he will compete with the winners of the graduate student research competition from about 25 major ACM conferences.

Akhil and the CAvSAT project has been funded by CROSS since the July 2018. Akhil’s faculty advisor for this project is Phokion Kolaitis. Dr. Kolaitis noted that he and Akhil were “grateful to CROSS for the support that Akhil has been receiving for the past year. This accomplishment would not have been possible without CROSS' support.”