Dr. Suman Raj, an alumna of the Department of Computational and Data Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), has been selected as one of six international recipients of the 2026 IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing (TCSC) Outstanding Ph.D. Dissertation Award. The award recognizes her doctoral research on the intelligent orchestration of autonomous systems across the edge-cloud continuum.
Dr. Raj completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Yogesh Simmhan at the DREAM:LAB in November 2025. Her dissertation, “Intelligent Orchestration of Autonomous Systems Across the Edge-Cloud Continuum,” developed new scheduling, resilience and programming techniques for autonomous mobile systems. Her work jointly considers computation, communication and physical mobility in applications such as assistive navigation, crop monitoring and wildfire response.
Her doctoral research resulted in systems including GEMS, for scheduling continuous AI inference across edge and cloud resources; MARC, for jointly optimizing UAV routes and computation placement; AeroResQ, for resilient wildfire-response fleets; and AeroDaaS/Ocularone, a programming and runtime framework for autonomous aerial applications. These contributions were evaluated through large-scale simulations, hardware experiments and field deployments, and have appeared in venues including IEEE/ACM CCGrid, IEEE ICWS, ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems and Future Generation Computer Systems.
Dr. Raj is currently a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory, where she is extending her research to scheduling and agentic orchestration for high-performance scientific applications.
The award will be presented at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on High Performance Computing and Communications, scheduled for 29 October to 2 November 2026 in China.
The CDS community congratulates Dr. Raj on this outstanding international recognition.
