IEEE SERVICES 2021 Awards

IEEE SERVICES 2021 Awards

2021 SERVICES Congress Awards

IEEE World Congress on Services (SERVICES) recognizes outstanding individuals and team efforts annually with the goal of inspiring members of the services computing community and facilitating transdisciplinary collaborations. Cash prizes are provided selectively for awards administered by IEEE Technical Committee on Services Computing (TCSVC). Congratulations to the winners of the following 2021 SERVICES Congress awards.

The Women in Services Computing Symposium awarded a number of student scholarships in 2021. The symposium also featured a talk by 2021 IEEE TCSVC Women in Services Computing Award winner Dr. Kaoutar El Maghraoui. Congratulations to the WISC symposium student award winners and to Dr. El Maghraoui!

Best Paper, Best Student Paper, and Special Paper Awards were announced by the affiliated conferences: CLOUD, ICDH, ICWS, SCC, and SMDS. Congratulations to these researchers for their excellent work!

The ICDH Conference, with support from the National Science Foundation, held a student project contest with prizes for winners. The project videos for all submissions are linked below. Congratulations to all of the ICDH Student Contest winners!

2021 IEEE TCSVC Rising Star Award

Dr. Ning Zhang, Associate Professor, University of Windsor
 --Outstanding contributions to the research and practice of mobile edge computing (MEC) and Internet of Things (IoT) service
--He has published more than 180 papers in international journals and conferences
--Co-receiptient of 6 best paper awards
--Over 7800 citations based on Google Scholar
--Active in providing professional services to the research community
--Associate Editor of IEEE Internet of Things Journal, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking, and IEEE Systems Journal

2021 IEEE TCSVC Research Innovation Award

Dr. Rajkumar Buyya, The University of Melbourne, Australia
 --For his outstanding pioneering work in cloud computing, technology transfer into startup and major cloud players, and an amazing citation index.
--Work span the entire research and innovation cycle
--He graduated 50+ PhD students who are working in leadership roles
--116,800 citations and an h-index of 149
--Raj is not only a visionary, but also a pragmatist
--Developed innovative service-oriented container system for building Cloud platforms supporting multiple programming models
--His software (e.g., CloudSim) used in 50+ countries

2021 IEEE TCSVC Women in Service Computing Award

Dr. Kaoutar El Maghraoui, IBM TJ Watson Research Center
 --For her work in the development of infrastructure for next generation AI hardware and critical leadership and contributions to Arab women in Computing organization.
--Co-leads IBM Research AI hardware technology testbed
--Her innovations are at the intersection of systems, AI and cloud services
--Very strong record of services to various women in computing communities
--Global vice-chair and key contributor to the Arab women in Computing organization (ArabWIC)
--13 Patents
--Very active speaker and panel member
--Organized many conferences and workshops

2021 IEEE TCSVC WISC Team Award

Mari Abe, WISC 2021 Program Chair & Yuki Abe, WISC Logo Designer
 This year, for the first time, the WISC is pleased to present a TEAM AWARD for outstanding contributions to the WISC Symposium This award is jointly presented by the IEEE TCSVC, IEEE SERVICES and CCF TCSC. This award recognizes the efforts of two outstanding contributors who worked 'behind the scenes' to make the symposium a success. Mari Abe, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software,is one of the Program Chairs of WISC this year, and has devoted countless hours in planning the agenda, securing speakers, preparing materials, and following up on every detail to insure that the symposium ran flawlessly. We owe Mari a enormous 'thank you' for her dedication and attention to all the activities which made the symposium a technical and professional success. Yuki Abe, who is also Mari's sister, and an accomplished writer and designer, developed our WISC logo, which captures the spirit and intention of WISC. Yuki designed an entire set of logos with various type faces and color schemes which we can use in various materials, and for many years. We are very fortunate to have two such dedicated and generous women as part of our WISC family. Thank you, Mari and Yuki!

Hackathon Award

General Category Award: QAOA Hierarchical Clustering
Anh Pham and Daniel Beaulieu

Student Category Award: The Traveling Salesman Problem
Freya Shah, Jaimil Dalwadi, Abiskar Thapa Kshetri and Yoyo Liu

Best Paper Awards

CLOUD 2021

Best Paper Award: Real-time Task Scheduling in a FaaS Cloud
Mark Szalay, Peter Matray, Laszlo Toka

Best Student Paper Award: Towards a Robust Meta-Reinforcement Learning-Based Scheduling Framework for Time Critical Tasks in Cloud Environments
Hongyun Liu, Peng Chen, Zhiming Zhao

Special Paper Award: Efficient Processing of Streaming Data using Multiple Abstractions
Abdul Qadeer and John Heidemann

Special Paper Award: Primitives Enhancing GPU Runtime Support for Improved DNN Performance
Aditya Dhakal, Sameer G. Kulkarni, K.K. Ramakrishnan

ICDH 2021

Best Paper Award: Exploring Relationships between Cerebral and Peripheral Biosignals with Neural Networks
Alexander H. Hatteland, Ricards Marcinkevics, Renaud Marquis, Thomas Frick, Ilona Hubbard, Julia E. Vogt, Thomas Brunschwiler, Philippe Ryvlin

Best Student Paper Award: Passive COVID-19 Assessment using Machine Learning on Physiological and Activity Data from Low End Wearables
Atifa Sarwar, Emmanuel Agu

Special Paper Award: Towards Blockchain-based Secure Data Management for Remote Patient Monitoring
Md Jobair Hossain, Hossain Shahriar, Maria Valero, Sweta Sneha, Sheikh I. Ahamed and Mohammad Rahman

ICWS 2021

Best Paper Award: R-CASS: Using Algorithm Selection for Self-Adaptive Service Oriented Systems
Niranjana Deshpande, Naveen Sharma, Qi Yu, Daniel E. Krutz

Best Student Paper Award: Microservice Pre-Deployment Based on Mobility Prediction and Service Composition in Edge
Jiale Deng, Bing Li, Jian Wang, Yuqi Zhao

Special Paper Award: An Empirical Study on Underlying Correlations between Runtime Performance Deficiencies and "Bad Smells" of Microservice Systems
Lei Liu, Zhiying Tu, Xiang He, Xiaofei Xu, Zhongjie Wang

SCC 2021

Best Paper Award: Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Container-enabled Mobile Edge Computing
Ao Zhou, Sisi Li, Shangguang Wang

Best Student Paper Award: A Text Mining Based Method for Policy Recommendation
Tong Zhang, Mingyi Liu, Chao Ma, Zhiying Tu, Zhongjie Wang

SMDS 2021

Best Paper Award: AC2M: An Automated Consent Management Model for Blockchain Financial Services Platform
Zhiyu Xu, Tengyun Jiao, Ziyuan Wang, Sheng Wen, Shiping Chen, Yang Xiang

Best Student Paper Award: An Auxiliary Learning Task-Enhanced Graph Convolutional Network Model for Highly-accurate Node Classification on Weakly Supervised Graphs
Zengmei Zhuo, Xin Luo, MengChu Zhou

IEEE WISC Scholarships

The IEEE WISC Scholarships are presented to deserving female students pursuing technical educations. Both graduate and undergraduate students were considered for the scholarships. Applicants were judged based on their technical interests, career goals, contributions to the STEM community, etc... In 2021, two types of scholarships were awarded. The IEEE WISC Premier Scholarship was awarded to 3 students (1 award per region) with a $500 monetary award. The IEEE WISC Scholarship was awarded to 9 students (3 awards per region) with a $300 monetary award. Congratulations to all of our scholarship recipients!

WISC Premier Scholarship Awardees
Amani Abusafia is a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Athman Bouguettaya at the University of Sydney. She received her bachelor's degree and her master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, in 2009 and 2013 respectively. She worked as a lecturer at the Department of Computer Science at University of Sharjah for 6 years. Her research interests include service computing, crowdsourcing, and IoT.
Eng. Marah Talal Alhalabi received her B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering in August 2017 from Abu Dhabi University and is currently pursuing her M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Marah is a member of the AI in BioImaging Research Lab and works as a Teaching Assistant of Electrical and Computer Engineering as well as a Research Associate at the Research Lab. She has worked on several awarded projects and competed in prestigious competitions. She was the runner-up for two years in a row in the UAE’s ThinkScience national competition in the Smart Systems and AI category. She also received the People’s Choice Award in the 2018 MENA region Future Generation Competition. She received the “Best Paper Award” for her paper An Integrated Caregiver-Focused mHealth Framework for Elderly Care in 2015 at the Third International Workshop on e-Health Pervasive Wireless Applications and Services. Marah was awarded the Overall Award of Excellence in the College of Engineering at Abu Dhabi University in 2015-2016. Her research interests include machine learning, computing, bioimaging, and smart systems.
Hadjer Benmeziane received her Master and Engineering degrees in Computer Science at the Higher National School of Computer Science, Algiers, Algeria in July 2020. She is currently pursuing a PhD degree in Computer Science at the Polytechnic University of Hauts-de-France, LAMIH/CNRS, Valenciennes, France. Currently, she’s working on accelerating AI services on different hardware platforms by leveraging Hardware-aware Neural Architecture Search.

WISC Scholarship Awardees
Balsam Alkouz is a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Athman Bouguettaya at the University of Sydney. She received her bachelor's degree in IT Multimedia and master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, in 2016 and 2018 respectively. She worked as a Research Assistant in the Data Mining and Multimedia Research at the University of Sharjah. Her interests focus on IoT, service computing, and include data mining. She is a Women Techmakers Ambassador and a Google Developer Student Club strategy and operations team member at the University of Sydney.
Vaidehi Thakre is currently pursuing her B. Tech degree focused in Computer Science Majors from Dr. Vishwanath Karad MIT World Peace University. Vaidehi has an excellent academic background as she has consistently maintained a 9.6+/10 CGPA throughout her engineering span. She finds herself to be an avid researcher and her prime research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Neuroscience, and Forensic Anthropology. She has published 3 research papers, one of which titled ‘PCOcare: PCOS Detection and Prediction using Machine Learning Algorithms’ was awarded the ‘Best Paper Award - Machine Learning Track’. Vaidehi serves as an AI R&D intern at In-Med Prognostics, India where she is instrumental in researching Neurodegeneration and how AI is relevant in this domain. Vaidehi, apart from her academics, is extremely active in Co-Curricular and Extra-Curricular. She is a Global Ambassador for two organizations: WomenTech Network and Society of Women Engineers and dynamically works to support their cause and mission. Last but not least, Vaidehi is a student volunteer at two NGOs and teaches young underprivileged kids in rural India English and Science subjects. Vaidehi has been awarded numerous scholarships for her exemplary academic nature and has been recognized on several platforms for her contribution to the Society of Women Engineers. Vaidehi wishes to devote her knowledge and engineering aptitude for Healthcare Research.
Eng. Maha Yaghi is an MSc in Electrical and Computer Engineering student and a Teaching Assistant of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Abu Dhabi University. She is interested in Mobile applications, Embedded systems, Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Machine Learning in Medicine, and Hardware and Software programming. She received her B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Abu Dhabi University in 2019 and was a consistent dean’s lister. She has led her capstone team towards developing a Computer-Aided Diagnosis and Visualization system of Cancerous Nodules in 2019. During COVID-19, she developed and co-authored systems that use multiple video object tracking techniques to monitor social distancing and face recognition techniques to aid governments in enforcing home quarantines. She won first place for two years in a row in the national Emirates Global Aluminum competition to design robots and drones for monitoring the health of industrial processes and published her work in MDPI Sensors. She has also worked on various projects, including a Quarantine tracking app and a Wearable IoT-based Joint Flexion Sensing device for Computer-Aided Diagnosis of Motion Ailments, and received multiple awards.
Snehal Khandve is cuurrently pursuing Bachelors in Computer Engineering at University of Pune. She is active in competitive programming, web-development and internships. She has explored Natural Language Processing(NLP) in AI and published a research paper in the domain. She enjoy doing full-stack development and have a knack for problem solving.
Aishwariya Chakraborty is a Ph.D. student at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, working under the supervision of Prof. Sudip Misra and Prof. Jhareswar Maiti. She works in the domain of Internet of Things-based networks and services. Prior to this, she received her Master of Science (by Research) (MS) degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kharagpur in 2019. Her MS thesis is entitled "QoS-Aware Sensors-as-a-Service in Sensor-Cloud". Previously, she completed her Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Institute of Engineering and Management, Kolkata, India in 2015. She is a recipient of the N2Women Young Researcher Fellowship 2020 and AnitaB.org Grace Hopper Student Scholarship 2021. She is a member of Smart Wireless Applications & Networking (SWAN) Research Group, IIT Kharagpur. She is also an active volunteer of IEEE and a student member of ACM. To know more about her work, please visit
<a href="https://aishwariyachakraborty.github.io/" target="blank"> https://aishwariyachakraborty.github.io/.</a>
Krisha Bhambani is a pursuing her Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the Pune Institute of Computer Technology in India. She is currently in her final year. She is an accomplished developer, who specializes in the fields of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
Krisha is deeply passionate about the projects she works on. Some of her projects have received national and international acclaim, and funding from notable institutes. She has publications in the domains of security and applications of machine learning.
Poorva Bedmutha is pursuing her Bachelors from Pune Institute of Computer Technology in Electronics & Telecommunications, with an Honor’s in Data Science. She is highly passionate about Machine Learning and Computer Vision and aims to leverage its power through Cloud Computing to develop algorithms for a smarter tomorrow. Partly, she is doing so by volunteering as an ML Engineer at Omdena. She also volunteers at PICToSocial, a local organization, to educate and guide underprivileged kids. Beyond academics, she has been learning Hindustani Classical Music for over a decade and is also a trained Yoga practitioner!
Her goal is to contribute to research and education in the fields of Machine Learning and Data Science. Having had the privilege of being the first woman in her family to pursue STEM, she aspires to inspire and enable other women to pursue sciences.
Fariha Tasmin Jaigirdar is a final year Ph.D. student in the Department of Software Systems and Cybersecurity at the Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia. She is a member of IEEE, Australian Women in Security Network, N2Women Network, and Institute of Engineers (IEB) Bangladesh. Her research interests include different security applications of the Internet of Things (IoT), system engineering design and security analysis, trust and risk investigation, and security in health informatics. She has been in security-related research for more than nine years and has published several articles in renowned conferences and journals. She also serves as a volunteer in different women networking groups and organizes academic and social events.
Urjoshi Sinha is a fourth year PhD student in the department of Computer Science at Iowa State University. Her research focuses on automated software testing of highly customizable and data-driven software. Some of her recent work has used search-based optimization techniques such as genetic algorithms, to optimize configuration spaces in bio-informatics tools. Additionally, she is interested in big data systems and machine learning. She has around four years of professional experience working at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. in the area of database development and in server and database administration. In her spare time, she loves hiking and volunteering for STEM organizations on and off campus. She is also a TED Translator volunteer transcribing English talks from the TED series to Bengali.

ICDH 2021 Student Grants & Awards

Funding for the ICDH student competition has been provided through the National Science Foundation and the Technical Committee on Services Computing (TCSVC).

The ICDH organizing committee hosted a student competition event for US-based graduate students to support participant’s registration fees. The students were selected based on a project idea submission evaluated by distinguished judges. Winners will receive mentoring from selected judges. The mentoring activities will explore and expand research ideas on digital health. Minorities and women graduate students from diverse institutes were encouraged to apply throughout the diffusion of the participation grant in minority-serving institutions. Post-doctoral students were considered for support on a case-by-case basis.

  • First Place

    Ethical Sourced Digital Health Communication to Address Vaccination Hesitancey in the Poorest States of America
    Xishi Zhu, University of Alabama

  • Second Place

    Constructing Dynamic Treatment Regimes for Optimal Discharge Time in Case Management
    Sean Kent, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • Third Place

    Electrically Conductive Coordination Polymer for Flexible and Transparent Wearable Electronics
    Mohamed Hassan, Clarkson University

  • Special Promising Work Award

    Constructing Dynamic Treatment Regimes for Optimal Discharge Time in Case Management
    Sean Kent, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  • Special Promising Work Award

    Non-Invasive Blood Glucose Monitoring system using Raspberry Pi four
    Priyanka Pola and Soin Traore, Kennesaw State University

  • Special Promising Work Award

    Mobile-based Aid (mAID) tools for the development of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence
    Masud Rabanni, Md Ishrak Islam, Sayeda Farzana, Shiyu Tian

  • Special Promising Work Award

    HIPAA Compliant Sharing of EHR Data in PerHL
    Kallol Naha, University of Idaho

  • Special Promising Work Award

    Examining Participant Engagement in Healthy Juntos: A Family-based Digital Lifestyle Intervention for Hispanic Adolescents
    Vanina Pava, University of Miami

  • Special Promising Work Award

    Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Integration in Healthcare Organizations
    Redwan Walid, UMBC

  • Honorable Award

    A Comprehensive Framework for Modeling a Security-Aware Robust Smart Healthcare System
    Nur Imtiazul, Florida International University

    • Honorable Award

      Indoor Activity Recognition with mmWave Radar Sensor to Support Digital Health Research
      Mingdian Liu, Jieyun Hu, Hongyi Brian, Meng Wang, Iowa State University

    • Honorable Award

      Detecting Cardio-Metabolic Conditions from Surface Vibration Patterns Induced by Manual Wheelchair Users
      Haoxiang Yu, The University of Texas at Austin

    • Honorable Award

      A Health Equity Partnership
      Loren Gordon, University of Houston

    • Project Submission

      What more can Artificial Intelligence do?
      Temidara Agbesanwa, University of Houston

    • Project Submission

      Emergency Department Overcrowding Management Model Using Wearable Devices and Data Analytics
      Luisa Nino and Leonardo Valladares, Montana State University

    • Project Submission

      Interactive Story Authoring to Support Therapeutic Narrative Reflection in College Students
      Sarah Anne Brown, University of Florida

    • Project Submission

      Novel Approach for Improved Cardiac Arrhythmia Classification using Convolutional Neural Networks
      Ivan Nenadic, University of Michigan

    • Project Submission

      Comfortable Wheelchair Navigation for SCI Patients through Automated Surface Classification
      Huy Quang, Reetik Chandra, Tuong Hassan, Miami University Ohio

    • Project Submission

      Towards Developing an Explainable Healthcare Framework With AI-Human Collaboration - A Causal Perspective
      Uzma Hasan, UMBC

About the Technical Committee on Services Computing

Founded in 2003, IEEE Computer Society’s Technical Committee on Services Computing (TCSVC) is a multidisciplinary group whose purpose is to advance and coordinate work in the field of Services Computing carried out throughout the IEEE in scientific, engineering, standard, literary and educational areas. IEEE TCSVC membership details are available at http://tab.computer.org/tcsvc/