Ujwal Gadiraju defended his PhD thesis successfully on 24.10.17, earning a 'summa cum laude'. In his thesis titled, 'It's Getting Crowded! Improving the Effectiveness of Microtask Crowdsourcing', Ujwal tackled important challenges in crowdsourcing. The work has made noteworthy contributions by (i) advancing the current understanding of task types, worker behavior and quality control, (ii) developing novel mechanisms for worker preselection, and (iii) revealing hidden factors like crowd work environments and task clarity that affect and shape the quality of crowd work. Ujwal will now continue as a Postdoctoral Researcher at L3S Research Center. He plans to exploit the human computation and crowdsourcing expertise he has nurtured to solve important problems in other realms such as collaborative search.

Ujwal's PhD defense slide deck can be found here: https://goo.gl/8FaU5R, and his PhD thesis can be accessed here: http://www.l3s.de/~gadiraju/Ujwal-PhdThesis.pdf