Brian Noble receives 2024 SIGMOBILE Test-of-Time award

Brian Noble, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan, and his coauthors have been selected to receive the 2024 Test-of-Time Award by the ACM Special Interest Group on Mobility of Systems, Users, Data and Computing (SIGMOBILE). The award recognizes the substantial and sustained influence of Noble’s paper, “Agile Application-aware Adaptation for Mobility,” presented at the 1997 ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP). 

SIGMOBILE recognizes just a couple papers each year with the prestigious Test-of-Time Award, which aims to honor research that is at least 10 years old and has had a significant and lasting impact on the mobile computing field.

Noble’s paper, authored in 1997 while he was a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, introduced the concept of fidelity—the accuracy with which data presented on a client matches the server’s reference copy—as a key factor in mobile applications. This work pioneered application adaptation for mobile environments, extending operating systems to support mobile adaptations widely. Odyssey, the prototype described in the paper, showcased the benefits of application-aware adaptation, significantly improving performance by managing the execution of diverse mobile applications even in variable network conditions.

Noble’s work helped usher in a new era in mobile computing and continues to influence future generations of researchers. His innovative approaches have supported the design of adaptive and efficient mobile systems that cope effectively with real-world challenges. His contributions, not only to application-aware adaptation, but also across areas such as operating and storage systems, vehicle informatics, and mobile security, have had an enduring impact and continue to shape the trajectory of the field.