Intern
Chair of Computer Science II - Software Engineering

Awards and Recognitions

Fellowships / Advancement Awards

  • Runner-Up SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (S. Eismann)  from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) for his doctoral dissertation titled “Performance Engineering of Serverless Applications and Platforms" supervised by Samuel Kounev, January, 2024.
  • Runner-Up SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (J. Grohmann)  from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) for his doctoral dissertation titled “Model Learning for Performance Prediction of Cloud-native Microservice Applications" supervised by Samuel Kounev, January, 2023.
  • Special research award "Medicine 2022" (A. Schmieder / S. Kounev /  V. Borst) (25,000€) of the Vogel Foundation Dr. Eckernkamp for the interdisciplinary research project "Wunderkint" at the Chair of Software Engineering, November, 2022. [more]
  • SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (A. Bauer)  from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) for his doctoral dissertation titled “Automated Hybrid Time Series Forecasting: Design, Benchmarking, and Use Cases” supervised by Samuel Kounev, April, 2022.  [more]
  • Ph.D. Scholarship Grant of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes) (M. Sträßer) (three years financing), October, 2021
  • Gemeinsamer Promotionspreis der Unterfränkischen Gedenkjahrstiftung für Wissenschaft und der Universität Würzburg (A. Bauer)  from the University of Würzburg for his doctoral dissertation titled “Automated Hybrid Time Series Forecasting: Design, Benchmarking, and Use Cases” supervised by Samuel Kounev, May, 2021. [more]
  • SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (N. Herbst)  from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) for his doctoral dissertation titled “Methods and Benchmarks for Auto-Scaling Mechanisms in Elastic Cloud Environments” supervised by Samuel Kounev, April, 2019.  [more]
  • SPEC Kaivalya Dixit Distinguished Dissertation Award (A. Milenkoski) ($ 1000) from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) for his doctoral dissertation titled “Evaluation of Intrusion Detection Systems for Virtualized Environments” supervised by Samuel Kounev, April 12, 2018.  [more]
  • Universitätsförderpreis der Mainfränkischen Wirtschaft (S. Kounev / M. Züfle) (31 700 €) from IHK Würzburg-Schweinfurt to support research and education on the topic of "Novel Methods of Time Series Forecasting for practical Applications", April 26, 2018.
  • Promotionspreis (A. Milenkoski) (500 €) der Unterfränkischen Gedenkjahrstiftung für Wissenschaft und der Universität Würzburg für die Dissertation “Evaluation of Intrusion Detection Systems for Virtualized Environments” (Betreuer: Samuel Kounev). Verliehen am 11. Mai 2017 auf dem Stiftungsfest der Universität Würzburg, 2017.
  • Promotionsstipendium des Studienföderwerks Klaus Murmann (L. Iffländer) (three years financing) from Stiftung der Deutschen Wirtschaft
  • Google Research Award (S. Kounev / S. Spinner) ($ 81 650) from Google Inc. to support innovative research on the topic of "On-the-fly resource demand estimation during system operation“, August 19, 2015. [more]
  • Distinguished Dissertation Award (F. Brosig) (2 500 €) from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology sponsored by Uniserv GmbH for his doctoral dissertation titled “Architecture-Level Software Performance Models for Online Performance Prediction” supervised by Samuel Kounev, July 17, 2015. [more]
  • SPEC 2014 Presidential Award (S. Kounev) for "Excellence in Research" (long-lasting contributions to the field of performance evaluation and benchmarking of computing systems), March 2014. Awarded by SPEC President (Walter Bays) on March 26th, 2014 at the ICPE 2014 International Conference in Dublin, Ireland.
  • ABB Research Grant (S. Kounev / J. Walter) (63 000 €) from ABB Ltd. to support a promising graduate student with a project that combines academic research with industrial application to be carried out at the University of Würzburg, Germany, 2014. (Acceptance Rate: 4/69 = 5.7%)
  • IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Award (N. Herbst / S. Kounev) ($ 20 000) for 2014-2015 honoring exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. In 2014, less than 18% out of 350 nominated Ph.D. students worldwide received the award.
  • VMware Academic Research Award (S. Kounev / S. Spinner) (380 000 €) from VMware, Inc., USA for a 3-year project to be carried out at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, July 2012. (Acceptance Rate: < 10%)
  • Nomination (S. Kounev) by the President of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) for the Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG).
  • Distinguished Dissertation Award (K. Sachs) ($ 1000) from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. (SPEC) for his doctoral dissertation titled “Performance Modeling and Benchmarking of Event-Based Systems” supervised by Samuel Kounev, December 22, 2011. [more]
  • Emmy Noether Career Award (S. Kounev) (1 Mil. €) from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for excellent young scientists, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, April 2009. [more]
  • Research Fellowship (S. Kounev) (20 000 €) from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for 6-month project to be carried out at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, June 2008.
  • Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement (S. Kounev) (2500 €) from the Vereinigung von Freunden der Technischen Universität zu Darmstadt e.V. for the PhD dissertation "Performance Engineering of Distributed Component-Based Systems - Benchmarking, Modeling and Performance Prediction". Awarded in Darmstadt on April 28, 2006. [more]
  • Research Fellowship (S. Kounev) (80 000 €) from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for 24-month project to be carried out at the University of Cambridge, UK, November 2005.
  • Best Graduate Award (S. Kounev) in the Master of Science Program “Mathematics and Computer Science”, University of Sofia, 1999. Average grade from the 50 exams passed during the five years of study: 5.95 (6.00 being the highest).

Best Paper Awards

  • 10 Years Most Influential Paper Award (N. Herbst, N. Huber, S. Kounev, E. Amrehn) for the ICPE 2013 paper "Self-Adaptive Workload Classification and Forecasting for Proactive Resource Provisioning". 14th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2023), Coimbra, Portugal, April 15-19, 2023. [Einblick]
  • Best Industry Paper Award Runner Up (M. Straesser, J. Grohmann, J. von Kistowski, S.Eismann, A. Bauer,  S. Kounev) for the paper "Why Is It Not Solved Yet? Challenges for Production-Ready Autoscaling" . Proceedings of the 13th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2022). [pdf]
  • Best Student Paper Award (S.Eismann, L. Bui, J. Grohmann, C. Abad, N. Herbst, S. Kounev) for the paper "Sizeless: Predicting the Optimal Size of Serverless Functions" . Proceedings of the 22nd International MIDDLEWARE Conference (MIDDLEWARE2021). [pdf]
  • Best Paper Award Runner Up (V. Lesch, T. Noack, J. Hefter, S. Kounev, C. Krupitzer) for the paper "Towards Situation-Aware Meta-Optimization of Adaptation Planning Strategies". 2nd IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems (ACSOS 2021). [ pdf ]
  • Best Industry Paper (J. von Kistowski, J. Pais, T. Wahl, K.-D. Lange, H. Block, J. Beckett, and S. Kounev.)  for the paper "Measuring the Energy Efficiency of Transactional Loads on GPGPU." 19th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2019), Mumbai, India, April 2019. [ pdf | slides ]
  • Best Paper Candidate (A. Ilyushkin, A. Ali-Eldin, N. Herbst, A. Papadopoulos, B. Ghit, D. Epema, and A. Iosup). for the paper "An Experimental Performance Evaluation of Autoscaling Policies for Complex Workflows." 8th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2017), l'Aquila, Italy, April 22--26, 2017. [ pdf  | DOI ]
  • Best Poster/Demo Award (J. von Kistowski, M. Deffner, J. Arnold, K.-D. Lange, J. Beckett, and S. Kounev) for the demo on "Autopilot: Enabling easy Benchmarking of Workload Energy Efficiency". 8th ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2017), L'Aquila, Italy, April 2017.
  • Best Poster Award (J. von Kistowski, N. Herbst and S. Kounev) for the poster on "LIMBO: A Tool for Load Profile Modeling". Symposium on Software Performance (SOSP 2014), Stuttgart, Germany, November 26-28, 2014. [ http | .pdf ]
  • Best Paper Award (N. Huber, M. von Quast, M. Hauck, and S. Kounev) for the paper "Evaluating and Modeling Virtualization Performance Overhead for Cloud Environments". 2011 International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2011), Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands, pp. 563-573, May 7-9, 2011. Acceptance Rate (Full Paper): 11% (18/164). [ bib | http | .pdf ]
  • Best Paper Award (S. Kounev, K. Bender, F. Brosig, N. Huber, and R. Okamoto) for the paper "Automated Simulation-Based Capacity Planning for Enterprise Data Fabrics". 4th International ICST Conference on Simulation Tools and Techniques (SIMUTools), Barcelona, Spain, 2011. Acceptance Rate: 29.8% (23/77) [ bib | slides | .pdf ]
  • Best Paper Award (S. Kounev and A. Buchmann) for the paper Performance Modeling and Evaluation of Large-Scale J2EE Applications, 29th International Conference of the Computer Measurement Group on Resource Management and Performance Evaluation of Enterprise Computing Systems (CMG-2003), Dallas, USA. [ bib | .pdf | .pdf ]
  • Best Paper Award (S. Kounev and A. Buchmann) for the paper "Performance Modeling of Distributed E-Business Applications using Queueing Petri Nets", 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS-2003), Austin, USA. [ bib | DOI | http | .pdf ]
  • Best Paper Nominations
    • IEEE ISSRE 2014 (A. Milenkoski, B. Payne, N. Antunes, M. Vieira and S. Kounev)
    • ACM QoSA 2011 (B. Klatt, C. Rathfelder, and S. Kounev)
    • IEEE ISORC 2008 (S. Kounev, K. Sachs, J. Bacon, and A. Buchmann)
    • VLDB 2002 (S. Kounev and A. Buchmann)

Recognition of Service Awards

  • SPECtacular Award (A. Bauer) for Outstanding Research: RG Predictive Data Analytics and RG Cloud. Awarded by the SPEC President David Reiner (AMD) on February 6, 2023 at the SPEC Annual Meeting 2023.
  • SPECtacular Award (S. Eismann) for Outstanding Research: RG DevOps and RG Cloud. Awarded by the SPEC President David Reiner (AMD) on January 26, 2022 at the SPEC Annual Meeting 2022.
  • SPECtacular Award (N. Herbst) for Technical Leadership: Vice-Chair of RG Cloud, Lead of successful publication activities, RG Newsletter Editor since 2016, April 2018. Awarded by the SPEC President David Reiner (AMD) on April 12, 2018 at the ACM/SPEC ICPE conference banquet in Berlin, Germany.
  • SPECtacular Award (P. Rygielski) for Technical Leadership: RG Newsletter Editor 2011-2017, April 2017. Awarded by the SPEC President David Reiner (AMD) on April 25, 2017 at the SPEC RG Annual Meeting 2017 in l'Aquila, Italy.
  • SPECtacular Award (A. Milenkoski) for Outstanding Research: RG IDS Working Group, January 2016. Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Oracle Corporation) on January 16, 2016 at SPEC Annual Meeting 2016 in Freemont, California, USA.
  • SPECial Person Award (S. Kounev) for uniting academia & industry, Bob Cramblitt Principal, Cramblitt & Company, Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation (SPEC), October 17, 2014.
  • SPECtacular Award (A. Milenkoski) for Technical Leadership: RG Cloud Working Group, RG IDS Working Group, March 2014. Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Oracle Corporation) on March 26, 2014 at SPEC’s Quarterly Meeting in Dublin, Irland.
  • SPECtacular Award (Q. Noorshams) for Technical Leadership: RG Release Manager, RG Website/Tool Development, January 2013. Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Oracle Corporation) on January 23, 2013 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in Austin, TX, USA.
  • SPECtacular Award (S. Kounev) for Technical Leadership: Research Group Establishment, ICPE Development, January 2013. Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Oracle Corporation) on January 23, 2013 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in Austin, TX, USA.
  • SPEC Award (A. Milenkoski) for outstanding service as Secretary of the RG Cloud and RG IDS Working Groups, April 2013. Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Oracle Corporation) on April 20, 2013 at SPEC’s Quarterly Meeting in Prague, Czech Republic.
  • SPECtacular Award (F. Brosig), for outstanding service as ICPE’11 Local Organization Co-Chair, 2011.
  • SPECtacular Award (N. Huber), for outstanding service as ICPE’11 Local Organization Co-Chair, 2011.
  • ACM Recognition of Service Award (S. Kounev) for service as General Chair of the 2011 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE 2011), March 14-16, 2011.
  • SPECtacular Award (S. Kounev) in recognition for service as Founder of the SPEC Research Group (SPEC RG). Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Oracle Corporation) on January 26, 2011 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in Houston, USA.
  • SPECtacular Award (K. Sachs) for service as Program Chair of the SPEC Benchmark Workshop 2010 as well as co-founder of ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE). Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays on January 27, 2010 at SPEC's Annual Meeting in San Jose, USA. [more]
  • SPECtacular Performance Award (S. Kounev) in recognition for service as Co-Founder of the ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE) as well as the SPEC International Performance Evaluation Workshop (SIPEW). Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Oracle Corporation) on January 27, 2010 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in San Jose, USA. [more]
  • SPECtacular Performance Award (K. Sachs) for serving as SPECjms2007 benchmark architect, designer and lead developer. Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Sun Microsystems) on January 30, 2008 at SPEC's Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA.
  • SPECtacular Performance Award (S. Kounev) for leadership in driving and bringing SPECjms2007 to market. Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Sun Microsystems) on January 30, 2008 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in San Francisco, USA.
  • SPECtacular Award (K. Sachs) for service as Lead Developer of the SPECjms2007 Benchmark developed by SPEC's Open Systems Group (OSG). Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Sun Microsystems) on January 24, 2007 at SPEC's Annual Meeting in Austin, TX.
  • SPECtacular Award (S. Kounev) for service as Chair of the SPEC JMS Working Group of SPEC’s Open Systems Group (OSG). Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Sun Microsystems) on January 24, 2007 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in Austin, USA.
  • SPECtacular Award (S. Kounev) for continued contributions to the Java Subcommittee of SPEC’s Open Systems Group (OSG). Awarded by the Chair of the Java Subcommittee Ricardo Morin (Intel) on January 25, 2006 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in Austin, USA.
  • SPECtacular Award (S. Kounev) for outstanding contributions to the Java Subcommittee of SPEC’s Open Systems Group (OSG). Awarded by the SPEC President Walter Bays (Sun Microsystems) on January 27, 2005 at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in Sunnyvale, USA.
  • Elected BEA Technical Director (S. Kounev), BEA Systems, Inc., April 2004.
  • SPECtacular Performance Award (S. Kounev) for contributions to the specification and development of the SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark. Awarded on January 28, 2004 by the SPEC President Kaivalya Dixit (IBM) at SPEC’s Annual Meeting in San Jose, USA.

Student Awards

  • CAIDAS Best Master Thesis Prize 2021 (V. Borst) (1000 €) in the field "AI and Data Science" awarded by the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (CAIDAS) in cooperation with the Vogel Foundation for the thesis "Automated Detection of Cardiac Abnormalities in ECG Signals with a Multi-Head Attention-based CNN-RNN Model" (supervised by Marwin Züfle and Robert Leppich), University of Wuerzburg, December 2021. [more]
  • ASQF Förderpreis 2021 (M. Straesser) from ASQF e.V. and Ziehm Imaging GmbH for the thesis "Predicting Performance Degradations of Microservice Applications" (supervised by Johannes Grohmann), University of Wuerzburg, July 2021
  • ASQF Förderpreis 2018 (S. Eismann) from ASQF e.V. and Konzept Informationssysteme GmbH for the thesis "Auflösen expliziter Abhängigkeiten in architekturellen Performanzmodellen", University of Wuerzburg, July 2018
  • Best Master Thesis Award 2018 (S. Herrnleben) from GI/ITG Conference on Measurement, Modelling and Evaluation of Computing Systems (MMB) for the thesis "Model-Based Network Analysis and Optimization" Stefan Herrnleben (supervised by Johannes Grohmann and Pitor Rygielski), University of Wuerzburg, Germany October 2017. [more]
  • Best Master Thesis Prize (J. v. Kistowski) (1000 €) from GFFT (Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Forschungstransfers e.V.) for the thesis "Modeling Variations in Load Intensity Profiles" by Jóakim v. Kistowski (supervised by Nikolas Herbst and Rouven Krebs), University of Würzburg, Germany April 2015. [more]
  • Best Diploma Thesis Prize (N. Herbst) (1000 €) from FZI Karlsruhe (Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe) for the thesis "Workload Classification and Forecasting" by Nikolas Herbst (supervised by Nikolaus Huber und Erich Amrehn), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, July 2013. [more]
  • Best Graduate Award (S. Spinner) (2500 €) awarded to the best graduate from the Faculty of Informatics for his MSc thesis with the title “Evaluating Approaches to Resource Demand Estimation” and his overall outstanding achievements in the MSc program at the Faculty of Informatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, October 2012.
  • Award of the Faculty (R. Krebs) "Preisträger des Fachbereichs Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik" for his excellent certificate and Siemens Award for "sehr gute Leistungen im Studium und sehr guter Abschlussarbeit", Hochschule Karlsruhe, Germany, October 2011.
  • Best Diploma Thesis Prize (B. Klatt) (1500 €) in the category “Foundations of the Discipline” from ObjektForum Karlsruhe for the thesis "Modelling and prediction of event-based communication in component-based architectures" by Benjamin Klatt (supervised by C. Rathfelder and S. Kounev), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, May 2011.
  • Certificate of Recognition (Q. Noorshams) from ObjektForum Karlsruhe for the thesis "Focusing the optimization of software architecture models using non-functional requirements" by Qais Noorshams (supervised by A. Koziolek nee Martens), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, May 2011.
  • Research Student Award (D. Funke) from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) for his work on a game theoretic approach towards a truthful resource reservation mechanism. [more]
  • Research Student Award (F. Gorsler) from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) for his work on an approach to estimate resource demands in virtualized environments. [more]
  • Best Diploma Thesis Prize (P. Meier) (1000 €) from FZI Karlsruhe (Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe) for the thesis "Automated Transformation of Palladio Component Models to Queueing Petri Nets" by Philipp Meier (supervised by S. Kounev and H. Koziolek), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, July 2011. [more]
  • System z Application Award (N. Herbst) from IBM Informatics Innovation Center (IIC), Karlsruhe, Germany, December 2011. [more]
  • GSE Academic Award (F. Gorsler) from the IBM user group Guide Share Europe (GSE) for the project "DetOnBan: a Novel Approach for Detailed Online Banking and Bookkeeping", September 2011. [more]
  • Best Computer Science Graduate (Q. Noorshams) (among the top 10%) of the year 2010/2011. [more]
  • Best Computer Science Graduate (M. Faber) (among the top 10%) of the year 2010/2011. [more]
  • Best Computer Science Graduate (P. Meier) (among the top 10%) of the year 2010/2011. [more]
  • Certificate of Recognition (F. Brosig) from ObjektForum Karlsruhe for the thesis "Automated Extraction of Palladio Component Models from Running Enterprise Java Applications" by Fabian Brosig (supervised by S. Kounev and K. Krogmann), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, December 2010. [more]
  • Best Diploma Thesis Prize (F. Brosig) (1000 €) from FZI Karlsruhe (Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe) for the thesis "Automated Extraction of Palladio Component Models from Running Enterprise Java Applications" by Fabian Brosig (supervised by S. Kounev and K. Krogmann), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, July 2010. [more]
  • Best Diploma Thesis Prize (N. Huber) (2500 €) from GFFT e.V. (Gemeinnützigen Gesellschaft zur Förderung des Forschungstransfers e.V.) for the thesis "Performance Modeling of Storage Virtualization" by Nikolaus Huber (supervised by C. Rathfelder), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany, February 2010. [more]
  • Best Computer Science Graduate (F. Brosig) (among the top 10%) of the year 2009/2010.

Other Awards

  • Winner of the Bavarian FameLab  Contest (André Bauer) with the presentation "Teils Cloud, teils Green, mit Aussicht auf Höchstwerte von 8 bis 14 Servern", March 2020. [read more, see video]