The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prize Winners for 2010

AITO is very proud to announce the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes for 2010. The Senior Prize will be given to Doug Lea, State University of New York at Oswego, for his tireless advocacy of object-oriented techniques, his contributions to concurrent programming in Java, and his contributions to the practice of computing as well as to education. The Junior Prize will be given to Erik Ernst, University of Aarhus, Denmark, for his recent contributions to object-oriented programming.

The Dahl-Nygaard Prizes 2010 will be presented in June at ECOOP 2010, in Maribor, Slovenia.

The members of the Dahl-Nygaard Prizes 2010 Nomination Committee were: Jan Vitek (Chair), Sophia Drossopoulou, Arne Maus and Zoltán Horváth.

Doug Lea is a Professor at the State University of New York at Oswego, NY, USA. While he has made many contributions to computing over the years, the DN Committee has identified the following points that are particularly worthy of note. Doug Lea is the author of the popular introduction to concurrency in Java titled "Concurrent Programming in Java: Design Principles and Patterns". He is also a co-author on "Java Concurrency in Practice" and "Object Oriented System Development". Doug Lea wrote and maintains the "malloc" software library in use in many UNIX distribution and thus has millions of users. He was one of the author of an influential position statement ("The Geneva convention on the treatment of object aliasing") which was one of the inspiration for much of the object ownership work and, incidentally, was drafted at the 1991 ECOOP conference. Doug Lea is the specification lead of JSR-166 (java.util.concurrent) and main author of the software libraries. This work is significant as it has greatly enhanced the expressiveness of Java in concurrent applications and provide building blocks that are used by large numbers of practitioners to implement scalable concurrent systems in Java. Doug Lea is one of the driving forces behind the Java Memory Model and author of the "JMM Cookbook" that explains how to implement compilers that abide by the memory model. Doug Lea given much of his time to the community by being on the Program Committee and Chairing conferences such as OOPSLA, ECOOP, COORDINATION, ISMM, VEE, amongst other. As any one who has had the pleasure to be on a PC with him can attest, he is generous with his time as a reviewer, always providing detailed comments and insightful reviews. Doug Lea also plays a central role in the Java community. Finally, he is one of the few academics regularly involved in JSRs (Java Specification Request).

Erik Ernst is an Associate Professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark. He is interested in the design, implementation, static analysis, and the "philosophy" of programming languages. Erik has worked on the design and implementation of the language gbeta, and has greatly contributed to bridging the gap between the Scandinavian and the rest of the OO community. Erik has worked on different approaches to support code re-use in object oriented languages, and in particular on mixins, traits, aspects, and he has generalized the concept of virtual classes to family polymorphism, a mechanism which supports the safe specialization of a group of related classes. Erik has also worked on the implementation and formalization of the Java wildcards, and on the combination of static typing with dynamic composition. Finally, Erik has served the community through diligent participation in a large number of program committees, in which he is known for his very meticulous, detailed, and also supportive reviews.

The AITO Dahl-Nygaard Prizes are named for Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard, two pioneers in the area of programming and simulation. Their foundational work on object-oriented programming, made concrete in the Simula language, is one of the most important inventions in software engineering. Their key ideas were expressed already around 1965, but took over 20 years to be absorbed and appreciated by the broader software community. After that, object-orientation has profoundly transformed the landscape of software design and development techniques. It was a great loss to our community that both Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard passed away in 2002. In remembrance of their scholarship and enthusiastic encouragement of young researchers, in 2004 AITO established a prize to be awarded annually to a senior researcher with outstanding career contributions and a younger researcher who has demonstrated great potential for following in the footsteps of these two pioneers.

AITO (Association Internationale pour les Technologies Objets) is a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of object technology. Currently, it has 39 members and is registered in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Current President of AITO is Professor Eric Jul. For further information, visit www.aito.org or contact Eric Jul, eric@diku.dk.