Aayush Jain is the recipient of the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Indistinguishability Obfuscation From Well-Studied Assumptions.” Honorable Mentions for the 2022 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award go to Alane Suhr whose PhD was earned at Cornell University, and Conrad Watt, who earned his PhD at the University of Cambridge.
Watt’s dissertation, “Mechanising and Evolving the Formal Semantics of WebAssembly: The Web’s New Low-Level Language,” establishes a mechanized semantics for WebAssembly and defines its concurrency model. The model will underpin current and future web engineering. His dissertation is considered a stand-out example of developing and using fully rigorous mechanized semantics to directly affect and improve the designs of major pieces of our industrial computational infrastructure.
Watt is a Research Fellow (postdoctoral) at the University of Cambridge, where he focuses on mechanized formal verification, concurrency, and the WebAssembly language. He received a MEng in Computer Science from Imperial College London and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.
