UBC Electrical and Computer Engineering is proud to announce that two faculty members, Dr. Prashant Nair and Dr. Karthik Pattabiraman, received major international honours at the IEEE/IFIP Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2025) conference held this summer in Naples, Italy.
DSN is the flagship global venue for research in dependable computing. This year marked a historic milestone: This is the first time in the more than 50-year history of the DSN conference that both awards have gone to the same university, and is also the first time a Canadian university has won either award!
Test of Time Award — Dr. Prashant Nair
The Test of Timeaward recognizes outstanding DSN papers published 10 years ago that have had a sustained and important impact on the theory and/or practice of dependable systems and networks computing research. Only two papers are chosen for the award each year.
Dr. Nair received the award for his 2015 DSN paper, “AVATAR: A Variable-Retention-Time (VRT) Aware Refresh for DRAM Systems,” co-authored with colleagues from Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia, and ETH Zurich.
AVATAR proposed a novel system for safely reducing DRAM refresh operations by making the refresh policy aware of variable-retention-time cells and using ECC and background scrubbing to adapt refresh rates on the fly. AVATAR demonstrated significant potential improvements in both performance and energy efficiency for emerging high-density DRAM systems. Over the past decade, the paper has become a key reference for work on memory reliability, refresh optimization, and DRAM scaling in both academia and industry.
Jean-Claude Laprie Award — Dr. Karthik Pattabiraman
The Jean-Claude Laprie Award in Dependable Computing is awarded annually and recognizes outstanding papers that have significantly influenced the theory and/or practice of Dependable Computing. Pattabiraman won the award for his paper titled “Flikker: saving DRAM refresh-power through critical data partitioning” that he published in ASPLOS 2011 together with his colleagues at Microsoft Research and Northwestern University.
According to the award citation,
“Flikker was one of the first papers in the field of approximate computing, and attempted to bridge the worlds of dependability and energy efficiency (i.e., sustainability). The main idea was to trade off hardware reliability to save power in DRAM memories, and to allow programmers to control the tradeoff based on the semantics of their applications. While other papers had also explored the power-reliability tradeoff, Flikker was the first to do so at the programming language level. This was a fundamental innovation, as it allowed fine-grained control over the application’s semantics and quantified the risk that the developer was prepared to tolerate for achieving energy savings. Many other papers have built on the ideas proposed in this paper, as evidenced by the fact that it has been cited more than 650 times since its publication in 2011. … The ideas proposed in the paper have been widely adopted in industry. In particular, Microsoft has used similar techniques for their search cluster (Bing), and other companies have also invested in programmatically controlling DRAM power consumption at the application level”.
Additional Contributions
In addition to receiving the Laprie Award, Dr. Pattabiraman had a strong research presence at DSN 2025, with three papers in the main research track, a paper in the industry track in collaboration with Meta researchers, and a keynote address at the Workshop on Dependable and Secure Machine Learning (DSML). He was also recently elected Vice-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance, and will assume the Chair role in 2027.
These achievements highlight the strength of UBC ECE’s contributions to dependable computing and the global impact of the department’s research. We congratulate Dr. Nair and Dr. Pattabiraman on these exceptional honours.