The Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS), headquartered in Rochester, New York, in the United States, has issued a call for nominations for its 2026 Caspar Bowden Award for Outstanding Research in Privacy Enhancing Technologies.
The Caspar Bowden PET award is presented annually to researchers who have made an outstanding contribution to the theory, design, implementation, or deployment of privacy enhancing technologies. It is awarded at the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.
The Award carries a cash prize of USD3,000, as well as a physical award monument in the form of a statue, sponsored by the Caspar Bowden Legacy Fund for privacy advocacy and technology.
Any paper by any author written in the area of privacy enhancing technologies is eligible for nomination, but the paper must have appeared in a refereed journal, conference, or workshop, with proceedings published in the period from April 1, 2024, until March 31, 2026.
However, nominations for publications in conference proceedings when the dates of the conference fall outside of the nomination window (April 1, 2024, to March 31, 2026) are not acceptable.
Since PETS is associated with a journal publication, PoPETs, any PoPETs paper published in an issue appearing before the March 31 deadline is eligible, which typically means only Issue 1 of the current year.
Anyone can nominate a paper by submitting a nomination through the online platform: https://submit.petsymposium.org/award2026/
Nominations should include the paper title, the author(s), contact information for the author(s), publication venue and full reference, link to an available online version of the paper, and a nomination statement of no more than 500 words.
All nominations must be submitted by May 8, 2026.
The award committee will then select one or two winners among the nominations received.
The winner(s) will be publicly announced when the award is presented at the PET Symposium in July 2026. Winners are strongly encouraged to be present at the PET Symposium in order to receive the Award.
The complete Award rules, including eligibility requirements, can be found at https://petsymposium.org/award/rules.php.
The Caspar Bowden PET Award Chairs are Professor Awais Rashid, a professor of Cyber Security at the School of Computer Science in the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, and Professor Florian Kerschbaum, a professor in the David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo in Canada and former Executive Director of the Waterloo Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute.
