By Line Horndal Hjørne, AAU Communication and Public Affairs  

It is not every day you receive an award for your paper, that you made as a part of your PhD-project, that has proven to be able to stand the test of time. But Sokol Kosta is one of the researchers, that has done just that.

“In general, it is a great pleasure to be rewarded for the effort that we as researchers put into our work. I like to think that this is a special award since it is not easy to estimate the impact that a particular work might have in the future,” says Associate Professor Sokol Kosta.

The award is the IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award, and it serves as a testimony of high quality in the research work. It is presented at the INFOCOM 2024 conference in Vancouver in Canada, which is one of the top IEEE conferences.

The IEEE INFOCOM Test of Time Paper Award recognizes papers published between 10 to 12 years ago in the INFOCOM proceedings, that have been most cited and widely recognized to have a significant impact on the research community.

“The paper is one my most important works that I did during the PhD period, which was published at INFOCOM 2012. At the time, it was one of the first works that proposed and implemented in practice a solution for offloading heavy computational tasks from mobile devices to the cloud,” says Sokol Kosta.

The implemented system was called ThinkAir and was released as open source on GitHub. This allowed many other research groups to build their own systems on top of it, indicating the impact of the paper, which is nowadays shown by the more than 1500 citations the paper has received as of today in Google Scholar (999 in Scopus).

“Every university and research center strives to attract talented and skilled researchers. I believe that this award is a confirmation that Aalborg University has made a good choice to include me among its academic staff”, says Sokol Kosta.

Sokol started as an assistant professor at Aalborg University eight years ago. After four years he was promoted to associate professor. During this time, he has contributed to the university in terms of conducting research with great impact as well as teaching.

CONTACT FOR MORE INFORMATION:

• Associate Professor Sokol Kosta, Department of Electronic Systems