Aman Ahuja garners 2023 Innovative Student Thesis Award from Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations

The Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) has awarded its 2023 Innovative Student Thesis Award to Aman Ahuja, who was a Ph.D. student in computer science at the Sanghani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics.

Ahuja defended his dissertation this past summer and is currently an applied scientist at DocuSign in Seattle, Washington. His advisor was Edward Fox.

The organization’s annual award supports student efforts to transform the genre of the dissertation through the use of innovative research data management techniques and software to create multimedia Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). It includes a cash award and travel scholarship funds to attend a future ETD Symposium.  

Following is an excerpt from the email Ahuja received from the chair of the NDLTD Awards Committee notifying him of this honor:

“Your thesis, “Analyzing and Navigating Electronic Theses and Dissertations,” provides a technical framework to expand the access to the content of millions of published theses, like yours, which are constrained in their usability and usefulness by the portable document format. Current digital libraries are institutional repositories with the objective being content archiving, they often lack end-user services needed to make this valuable data useful for the scholarly community. To effectively utilize such data to address the information needs of users, digital libraries should support various end-user services such as document search and browsing, document recommendation, as well as services to make navigation of long PDF documents easier and accessible. Your research and dissertation directly addresses these concerns in creative and beneficial ways.”

Ahuja earned a bachelor’s degree in information systems from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, India, where, as part of his undergraduate studies, he was also a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.