Announcing the 2018 Future Internet Travel Award for PhD Students

With the goal of promoting the development of early career investigators in the fields of Internet technologies and the information society, Future Internet welcomed applications for the 2018 Future Internet Travel Award for PhD students. We received 30 applications for the award, and the overall quality of the applications was outstanding. On behalf of the Editors of Future Internet, I am pleased to announce the winner of the inaugural Future Internet Travel Award for 2018. The Future Internet Travel Award has been granted to Mr. Ankur Sarker, a Ph.D. candidate in Haiying Shen’ laboratory at University of Virginia. He will receive 800 CHF to help support travel to present his research at the ACM International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp 2018) in Singapore. His presentation is entitled “MORP: Data-Driven Multi-Objective Route Planning and Optimization for Electric Vehicles.”

Ankur Sarker received the BS and MS degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh in 2011 and 2014, respectively. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, Virginia, USA. Recent advancements in intelligent transportation systems have motivated Mr. Sarker to pursue his Ph.D. research on data-driven ubiquitous intelligent transportation systems. His research interests include Cyber-Physical Systems and Wireless Networks, with an emphasis on Data-driven Intelligent Transportation Systems and Mobile Opportunistic Networks. There are three main goals in Mr. Sarker’s Ph.D. research work. The first is to construct a more efficient collection of raw vehicle data from different sources so that data processing time and cost would be minimized. The second is to utilize a cloud-based big data framework to process vehicle data based on different machine learning algorithms. And, the third is to devise efficient approaches to building a green ubiquitous transportation system based on processed traffic data. As a contributor in several NSF and IBM funded ongoing projects, he is working on efficient crowdsourcing techniques for dynamic vehicular network and he has already developed two network-aware data parallel framework schedulers. In addition, Mr. Sarker has designed smart wireless power transfer systems for online electric vehicles with the consideration of vehicles’ routes and balancing the state of charge of batteries. In his recent work, he utilizes the spatio-temporal trends of human mobility to design a traffic flow prediction model. In the ongoing work, Mr. Sarker wants to extend his current topic to design safer and secured smart cities which involves accurately predicting the human mobility trends to design and plan safer and smarter city. Ankur Sarker is the recipient of the IBM PhD Fellowship for the 2016–2017 academic year. He has already published several first authored conference and journal papers in prestigious venues.

The Editor, Managing Editors, and Editorial Board Members congratulate Mr. Ankur Sarker on winning the 2018 Future Internet Travel Award and we are grateful to MDPI for their generous support of the award this year and in the future.