Winner of the Classification Society Distinguished Dissertation Award 2009 The Award honors the best PhD (or approximately equivalent doctoral) dissertation nominated by an annual deadline. The theme is clustering, classification, related areas of data analysis, encompassing both associated theory and/or applications. The 2009 Distinguished Dissertation Award winner is Dr. Innar Liiv for his dissertation "Pattern Discovery Using Seriation and Matrix Reordering: A Unified View, Extensions and an Application to Inventory Management" defended at Tallinn University of Technology under supervision of Professor Rein Kuusik, in August 2008. Dr. Georgi Nalbantov received an Honorable Mention for his thesis "Essays on Some Recent Penalization Methods with Applications in Finance and Marketing", Erasmus University Rotterdam. All 7 nominations were of excellent quality and are listed at http://www.classification-society.org/csna In 2009 the Award totals US$500 in book vouchers from Chapman and Hall/CRC. The winner is invited to make a presentation in a special plenary session at the Classification Society's 2009 Annual Meeting with up to $500 of the Award winner's travel expenses to the Annual Meeting covered by Classification Society. In 2008-2009, the evaluation committee included: Samantha C. Bates Prins (Award Committee Chair; Department of Mathematics & Statistics, James Madison University), Fionn Murtagh (Science Foundation Ireland; and Department of Computer Science, Royal Holloway, University of London), Douglas Steinley (Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri-Columbia) and Rebecca Nugent (Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University). ---------------------------------------------- CLASS-L list. Instructions: http://www.classification-society.org/csna/lists.html#class-l